Learned Helplessness, Locus of Control, and Pandemics
First of all, let's get this out of the way: Learned Helplessness is a myth. Stephen Maier and Martin Seligman, the original researchers who came up with the idea that people "learn" to be helpless actually had it backwards. Helplessness isn't "learned" in our brains. Helplessness in an extremely stressful situation is the natural default state. The "learned" behavior is actually success, or more specifically, control. Stephen Maier and Martin Seligman were graduate students when they performed some experiments in the 1960's that led to the apparent discovery of so-called "learned helplessness." Their outcomes seemed to indicate that their subjects (dogs) would "learn" to behave in a helpless manner after being exposed to an electric shock when the shock was administered in an "inescapable" setting, namely in a small chamber where the dogs were yoked. Conversely, the dogs who were given the shocks in an ...
