FYI "learned helplessness" is pseudoscience and has been debunked

TW animal abuse

I have a bee in my bonnet about this.

Psychologists and other bullshitters often cite "learned helplessness" - that in response to trauma we learn to give up and accept powerlessness to stop adverse stimuli or situations.

Basically in the 60s psychology researchers Seligman and Maier tortured dogs with electric shocks so much that the dogs stopped trying to escape the cruel experiments, which was somehow taken as surprising or noteworthy. This work was later used by the CIA to develop torture techniques.

Further work in more recent years has shown that the opposite is, in fact, true - that helplessness is an innate reaction to trauma and that avoiding negative stimuli is what has to be learned.

I really f**king hate this nonsense because people gloss over the part about trauma and literal torture, and just try to push a kind of "never give up" rhetoric. The poor dogs in the experiment literally COULDN'T escape at first. The scumbags then allowed the dogs to escape *after* they dogs had tried and tried to get away and eventually gave up hope.

Aside from the fact that this was a HORRIBLE thing to do and that they should have been punished for it rather than praised, the outcome is exactly what you'd expect, isn't it? Abused individuals who have no control over their situation have no choice but to accept their fate. Its just a matter or survival.

A similarly cruel and unnecessary study found that drowning animals can swim further and for longer if they can see a way out of the water. The animals that had no hope of surviving didn't *give up*, they accepted their fate because they literally had no choice.

As infants/children we had no power to stop our parents or intervene. We literally WERE helpless.

What really triggers me is how psychologists STILL try to imply that helplessness is somehow something we made up in our minds, and not just the cold hard reality of our young lives.

Edit: I haven't explained what I meant very well, I'm not an expert or a psychologist, plus I accept that I am at least a little defensive and Im also a bit overwhelmed at how many replies this has gotten.

I also accept that I take a somewhat anti-psychology stance here. I admit that I am angry and that I perhaps shouldn't take it out

What I am trying to say is that there is a "self efficacy" interpretation that I feel we are intended to take... that the in the latter phase of the experiment the animals had the choice or the option to escape - but chose not to take it. That the animals had constructed a kind of false helplessness in their minds.

This is OBVIOUSLY an extremely leading and unfair interpretation.

When I call Seligman and Maier 1967 pseudoscientific bullshit I mean that, either knowingly or just by sheer incompetence, they conditioned the dogs to act a certain way but then examined the animals' behaviour out of context. Another way of putting it, how on earth did they expect the animals to know, trust or even understand that "YOU ARE ALLOWED TO ESCAPE NOW". They were essentially gaslight the animals. Like a bully who has beaten you countless times now berating you for flinching "WHAT? DID YOU THINK I WAS GOING TO HIT YOU?".

The animals DID learn that they were in fact helpless, yes, but many commenters are disregarding that "learned helplessness" has an additional component, that A) animal is STRICTLY SPEAKING no longer helpless, and B) the animal has absolutely no way of knowing this.For me this is what makes it infuriating and objectionable, the old switcheroo... "oh but you aren't helpness NOW".... WELL HOW THE HELL ARE THEY SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT.

I call it pseudoscience because the experiement was engineered this way. The outcome follows from that, NOT from any supposed psychological phenomenon the reseachers claim to be perplexing and novel.

They conditioned those poor animals to behave EXACTLY a certain way, then flipped a switch in the experiment in a way that is ENTIRELY obfuscated from the subjects, and then observed that they continued to behave exactly the same way. WOW WHAT A SURPRISING OUTCOME. When they say the subjects "learned" to be helpless they're not referring to the first part of the experiment, but the second. We are asked to interpret that there is the absence of any REAL helplessness, but the subjects create it in their minds.

What I really cannot stand about the way this is used in popular psychology is that its pitched to us as a kind of "flaw" in our thinking. WHY did you learn to be helpless, HUH?! Like I CHOSE to be helpless. Its victim blaming.

Yes yes yes I know, reader, YOU arent engaging in victim blaming, but why oh why cant you see that thats how it OBVIOUSLY comes across. It feels so absolutely obvious to me, and I dont know if you can tellk, but I feel really rather slighted and upset by it.

If psychologists dont want us to feel that they are trying to blame us for our trauma, can they please rethink the way they talk about it, perhaps.