by TeachThought Staff
What is learned helplessness?
meaning
Learned helplessness is a psychological condition in which, after repeated failures or negative experiences, people believe they have no control over the outcome of the situation and stop trying to improve or change the situation.
Below is an example of learned helplessness in the classroom.
Instructor: Throughout this text, the biggest fear for adolescents is that it doesn’t apply to them. Jesse, you talked about acceptance. Now, let’s try performing the activity to understand how this happens, what it looks like, and how it feels. This is a do-it-yourself activity and should not impose any burden on you. These are easy tasks. This is just to give you a feel for what I’m about to explain.
Everyone, if you’d like, please take out a short piece of paper. Distribute these documents. Please keep it face down. And please, no one writes about these. Write it on your own paper.
Does anyone have one? Now, if you like, do them one at a time. I’ll tell you when to do it.
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Instructor: Everyone, please turn the paper over and do your work. This doesn’t mean it’s difficult. These are anagrams. Just run the first one. Please go ahead and resolve it. An anagram is an arrangement of letters to form a word.
When you’re done, I’d like you to raise your hand. Please continue, we are waiting for you.
Please raise your hand. Please do only number 1. Please don’t continue.
Instructor: Okay, let’s move on to number two. Don’t worry about number 1. Go to number 2 and solve it. Once again, please raise your hand when you’re done.
Yes, everyone please lower your hands. Then execute number 3. For number 3, rearrange the letters and raise your hand as soon as you’re done.
Here’s what you need to know: I was given two different lists. This side of the room was given three words. These were given to the left side of the room. “Bat”—what’s that word? The second word was “lemon.” Brian, what is that word?
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Brian: “It’s a melon.”
Lecturer: Yes. It was a simple word. But here’s the trick. Both sides of the room were given the same third word. It was “Shinorama,” an anagram of “American.” But the first two words on this side of the room could not be resolved. They were impossible tasks.
Sorry, the reason I did it this way is: I was able to induce something called “learned helplessness” on the left side of the room very easily, within about 5 minutes. When you see the person on the right side of the room raising their hand because they completed a task, I want you to think about what happened to you on the left side of the room.
What happened in between? Jolie?
Jolie: I felt stupid.
Instructor: You felt stupid. Understood. what else?
Joel: It felt rushed.
Instructor: It felt like you were in a hurry. Joel?
Joel: I’m even more confused.
Instructor: They have already solved it and are still struggling, which made you even more confused. Chelsea?
Chelsea: It was frustrating.
Lecturer: I’m annoyed. What happened to get to the third word? What I’m trying to say here is that this side of the room is not much more intelligent than this side. It was a random assignment. So why did we have an even harder time with the third word, which is the same word, Brian?
Brian: My confidence was shattered.
Lecturer: That’s right. What you experienced is a term called “learned helplessness.” How many of you have heard this word?
Instructor: “Learned helplessness” is often used in academic literature. Jolie, do you know what that means?
Jory: Basically, if they fail once or can’t do something once, they apply that to everything in the future. Therefore, all future tasks will be biased by it.
Lecturer: That’s right. And this is what I want everyone to understand. Typically, this is only used in academic research and can be found in educational psychology books and school textbooks. But I’m going to think about how learned helplessness can be applied to social situations. Can someone give me an example of what that looks like? Tasha?
Tasha: It’s like when a guy asks a girl out on a date and gets rejected, he can’t keep trying. He just stopped asking.
Lecturer: That’s right. Now, let’s think about girls. Here we have explained Ophelia’s resurrection. Consider how this applies to friendships. Does learned helplessness also occur in friendships? Friendships are hard to form and maintain. It’s a difficult process.
Once a girl sacrifices her morals for the approval of her friends and men, she’s more likely to keep doing it, right?
Instructor: And just to be clear, if Karl was victimized once in elementary school, is there a chance that he will stand up for himself next time?
Students: No.
Instructor: What’s going to happen next time? And what’s next? What we know, and this is what we’ve learned, is that there is cultural pressure on girls to be quiet. There is cultural pressure on girls not to get angry and not to speak up. So if someone has been victimized once, and Alison has been victimized once, the same concept of learned helplessness can be applied to social relationships.
So the moral of this story is that it’s important for girls to practice dealing with failure. Because when we fail, our instinctive reactions shut down. And if you close your mind, you won’t be open to learning new ways of relating.
This version separates speakers, makes transitions clearer, and adds punctuation to clarify flow. Want more editing?
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