Learned Hopelessness

For some reason the psychological condition of Learned Helplessness has been floating around the back of my mind for a while. The last time I had any real exposure to the concept was in the fall of 2005 when I took an introductory psychology class.

The concept began with Martin Seligman's experiments at Cornell University in the late 1960s. In his first experiment, he placed three sets of dogs in harnesses. The first set hung in the harness for a set amount of time then was released. The second set was subjected to electric shock which they could turn off by activating a lever. The third set was exposed to a shock of the same duration and intensity as the second set, but had no control over the initiation of cessation of the shock. From their perspective, the shocks began and stopped at random.

Following this initial experiment, the first two sets of dogs seemed fine. The third set, however, exhibited signs consistent with psychological depression. Moreover, they exhibited a sense of helplessness that was absent to the other sets of dogs.

For a second part of experimentation, Seligman put the dogs into a room divided into two parts by a low partitition. On one side of the partition the floor was electrified and on the other side it was not. When dogs from the first two sets of the previous experiment were put on the electrified floor, they quickly jumped over the partition into the "safe" side of the room. The dogs from the third set, however, had learned that they had no power to end the eletric shock and chose to remain on the electrified side. They suffered through the pain because they had previously learned that they were unable to end the pain of electric shock through any form of action. They could have easily escaped the shocks, but they had learned to be helpless.

The interesting thing is that not all the group three dogs were immobilized in the second experiment. About a third of the dogs escaped the circumstances. Seligman concluded that during the learning period, the dogs either learned to be helpless in a context specific manner or to be helpless in a more permanent, pervasive manner. Two thirds of the dogs learned the latter, while the more resilient remainder the former.

One noteworthy aspect of the human correlation to Learned Helplessness is vicarious learned helplessness. A person can learn to be helpless merely by observing another's struggle against uncontrollable events.

Now after all that, I wonder if Learned Helplessness is in any way present in the American public's reaction to high gas prices. To sum up common sentiment in blunt terms, "High gas prices suck, but there's nothing we can do but pay them." Have we learned to be helpless in the face of a large, complex system that is difficult to understand or are we just too lazy to put forth the effort to fight against high gas prices?