You Don't Learn Helplessness - You Learn Control
Developer Tea

You Don't Learn Helplessness - You Learn Control

B2Upper-intermediateSeptember 5, 202616 min

In 1967, a study on shock avoidance gave us "learned helplessness," and for nearly fifty years that was the prevailing explanation for why people give up. Then the original authors published a follow-up with brain scan data showing they had it backwards. We don't learn to be helpless — passivity is the default. What we learn is control. In today's episode, I explore what that reversal means for anyone facing a hard problem right now, and why a single small action can shift your entire orientation toward a challenge you haven't solved yet. The Study That Reversed Itself: Understand how th...

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nothing you do can stop it from happening, that you eventually give up, that you learn

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And this was the prevailing theory all the way up until about 10 years ago.

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B2 · Upper-intermediate

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0:00

In 1967, an interesting study was published that established the concept of learned helplessness. The basic idea is that if you are subjected to a negative experience of some kind, in this case, I believe it was dogs receiving a mild shock that was uncomfortable, but nothing you do can stop it from happening, that you eventually give up, that you learn

0:46

that you are helpless. And this was the prevailing theory all the way up until about 10 years ago. When the same authors of that original paper, they published a new paper with a lot of data, particularly brain scan data, showing that there was an association, but that it

1:10

was kind of the opposite of what they thought, that you don't learn helplessness, but instead you learn control. The data basically shows that in the same situations where these animals are subjected to a negative experience, I think in the examples that they provide in the paper, it's rats

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