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I'm not sure why there's a few negative comments here. The dialectic the article sets up is clear:
Prior: People acquire helplessness through reinforced external negative stimuli (dysphoric)
Author: No, it isnt the presence of negative stimuli, but the absence of internal positive (control-promoting)
Let me give an example from my own life this morning. For quite awhile I've been leaving things in random places where they aren't tidy (prone to breaking, etc.). This morning, for the first time in awhile, I made the extra effort to move something to a better place.
On the first model, and an intuitive one, it was the effort to pick up the items that was the negative stimuli. So the treatment is: learn to enjoy tidying, etc.
Rather, I actually experienced the opposite, and I sort of realised it at the time.
This week I began resetting all my schedules, alarms; started reorganising my day. And it's no coincidence that this tidying-act followed; as have many since i've done this. The heart of the change was actually just putting 4 alarms on my phone.
So what has happened?
I havent learnt to enjoy anything more. Rather, I've started rehabituating my self of control -- by even trivial changes, I am strengthening that sense. The items of my apartment more clearly appear as objects that I can control, rather than a chaotic environment that's beyond control.
This I think is incredibly important in how we frame advice in these cases.
If you have some "learned helplessness", don't focus on the tasks over which you're helpless. Do something quite radically different: practice taking small steps of control, which require minimal effort -- and so on.
I've called this the snowball of success where you make small, disciplined actions that you call "success" (_setting an alarm_) than then "snowballs" into larger "successes" (_cleaning your room_). The opposite is true as well, in my experience: if you fail to make the _small_ actions, it will "snowball" into you not making the larger actions throughout the day.
I've been calling these the "virtue cycle" and the "viscous cycle" - both being behaviors that reinforce "similar behaviors". Most people are familiar with the term "viscous cycle" and the idea of a downward spiral of reinforcing behaviors, but that same interlocking mechanism works in reverse too. One can generate an expanding series of positive behaviors to eliminate bad habits, promote positive behaviors and instill a more positive general attitude simply by proving to yourself that you are indeed in control of yourself.
US Marines are trained to make their bed with military speed and precision as the first thing they do each morning. If one can't do that little thing how can one accomplish everything else with military speed and precision for the rest of the day?
I make snowballs, then I just eat them.
Eg. tidiness slips in small actions, accumulating, then at some point I just clean it all up as one act and I may-or-may-not break that act into smaller bites (that probably just make sense from an order of operations/batching standpoint.)
Also, generally for things like tidiness, I keep a couple rules. Pick up daily before bed. This covers 80%. But sometimes I'll let that go or only clean halfway, then I must catchup on Sunday. But, cleaning is definitely a full mode I put myself into. If I started doing small unrelated tasks hoping it prodded me to get up and clean, I never would.
That's true, to a degree. At some point you will hit both a time delay barrier inhibiting the training...
Having to learn delayed gratification is hard for an AI and hard for humans.
And then you'll hit the resource barrier. There's only so much and so hard any one person can control and influence with any given means.
It just does not work that way for me.
> On the first model, and an intuitive one, it was the effort to pick up the items that was the negative stimuli. So the treatment is: learn to enjoy tidying, etc.
Hmm. The negative stimuli here should be when something breaks. You'll always have to make some efforts to tidy things up, so it can't be a negative stimuli in itself because it's not one of the outcomes. Here it's a positive punishment (broken things should lead you to change the original behavior) (actually, not tidying up has its own positive reinforcement stimuli: you don't have to make efforts).
> I havent learnt to enjoy anything more. Rather, I've started rehabituating my self of control -- by even trivial changes, I am strengthening that sense. The items of my apartment more clearly appear as objects that I can control, rather than a chaotic environment that's beyond control.
Yes, there it is: positive stimuli reinforcing behavior. Which works better than positive punishment (or so I learned decades ago in psy101 ?).
All good, but the natural response to discomfort was to do something about it (perhaps this was previously learned?) but after repeated failure to do anything about it, the shocks become accepted). The helplessness was learned. Maybe that's reversion to a default though?
What you are describing has little to do with learned helplessness.
Well I wrote one of the negative comments and I think you give the article an apologetic interpretation (which is great). I can agree that if this is the point then it is a good advice, but how is it different from setting yourself SMART goals and the general wisdom from personal management in psychology or theory of action in philosophy? You seem to argue that learned helplessness is alike weakness of will and while they might be on continuum there is something different between those cases since under normal circumstances you don't fail to run away from pain. And while the way "out" might be similar if we we fail to understand the difference then we will fail to understand the mental state of people who are in genuine cases of learned helplessness such as many-year homeless people.
So, like, maybe a careful criticism is not that the article is wrong but it simplifies things to the point where on the one hand we are blinded to the most important things about learned helplessness and on the other hand besides the point that you bring up the article includes many rhetorical devices which obscure the main point.
This article seems to relay on the idea that by default we can take no action and therefore we don't acquire helplessness as it is the default. But it doesn't seem to make sense? The norm is that we make actions all the time and agency is expected. When one loses their agency then we are talking about learned helplessness. If we want to say "Oh, in fact those people did not learn helplessness since there is nothing like this to learn, it is more accurate to say that they find their circumstances so dire that all actions seem to them unreasonable effort as it won't allow them to change those circumstances." then I guess that true but it seems trivial. It is like saying that if you are so depressed that you don't eat then it is not depression but a default state since you need a reason to eat and you just fail to have that reason. Which is like, the point? We expect healthy people to take care of themselves and if they feel like there is no reason for them to do so then they are not back to some natural state which is fine. So I feel like there is no big discovery here. It is just terminological adjustment so that we can avoid possible misinterpretations plus some new fact from the neuroscience which doesn't change anything about our psychological understanding.
So yea, the big fanfare about "debunking" and how the science progresses are out of place. This is a one paragraph news without citation.
> So yea, the big fanfare about "debunking" and how the science progresses are out of place. This is a one paragraph news without citation.
Wait, what?!
This post is summarizing and then (past the sponsor blurb) literally citing the paper on this. Not just any paper, but one by the same authors who first created the theory of "learned helplessness" - and one in which they conclude they initially got the mechanism backwards. See:
Fair enough, this was a stupid oversight. Thanks for pointing this out!
> The norm is that we make actions all the time and agency is expected.
Agency about things we percieve we can control. There are vastly many more things which are out of our control, or require gargantuan effort to change, or would be extremely risky.
I don't think I understand how your comment relate to what I wrote.
> The norm is that we make actions all the time and agency is expected.
Why do you think that? By default, we know nothing and are lazy.
Consider a human child. We are born objectively helpless. Over time, we develop bodily strength and (ideally) learn correct ways of relating to reality. This is effectively rooted in humility, which is not false modesty as we commonly seem to think, but a habit or disposition of assimilating the truth and conforming ourselves to it. (The opposing vice is pride which is a rebellion against truths that we don't like; the result is alienation from reality and delusion and, therefore, objective helplessness.) Conformity with the truth is a prerequisite of prudence (the ability to be able to discern our true good in any given situation), which is a prerequisite of justice (constancy of will in giving everyone their due), which is a prerequisite of fortitude (the ability to remain steadfast in the pursuit of the good in the face of fear), which is a prerequisite of temperance (the moderation of desire in light of our nature and thus objective good).
The point? That we need to learn and acquire virtue to attain self-mastery which is true freedom. (Note the "self". It is not about controlling or dominating others.) There is no one so helpless as someone who is a slave to his passions.
This makes perfect sense to me. I used to suffer severely from “learned helplessness”. I’d spent my entire life dealing with undiagnosed bipolar.
Once I learned my mental issues had a name and could be coped with, it shook me out of that “helplessness”.
Knowing what you have power over lets you focus on the things you can control.
"A diagnosis"
When you can't escape suffering, you learn to cope with it in your mind instead of by escaping the stimulus. This allows you to adapt to a new normal and take what actions you can, optimizing for what you can control.
I see an interesting parallel with mindfulness here.
Isn't the right solution to {chronic pain, trauma and broken self-worth, inability to afford safe housing} to escape the internal/external situations incompatible with a fulfilling life, rather than to optimize for a "new normal" devoid of safety and a healthy environment? The problem arises when finding a better state is unattainable with the mental and financial resources available.
Stoicism is the practice of vigilance in order to partition the world into things over which you have control vs no control. The goal is to shift your engagement with the world to only account for, but not fret over, the latter, while you spend your attention and time on the former.
I guess I've misinterpreted the meaning of "learned helplessness." I've always thought it meant that the person had learned that it was easier to get someone else to do it instead of doing it themselves by feigning helplessness. I guess feigned helplessness is a better term for what I was thinking of?
Yeah, that’s unwillingness to do something they know they can do/learn if they wanted to. They aren’t helpless.
Actual helplessness has an element of fear or lack of control. The person thinks they aren’t able to do something. Essentially, they’ve given up because they don’t feel any of their actions have control over the outcome.
> the person had learned that it was easier to get someone else to do it instead of doing it themselves by feigning helplessness.
What you're describing is usually referred to as "weaponized incompetence."
I very much appreciate this article as it explains how science advances.
I read the book by Seligman and highly recommend it also to people outside the field.
On the other hand it seems like the author needs to justify that science can be wrong and needs refinements.
It’s very tedious. I remember during my PhD that I had to put these disclaimers on top too. I would expect that this is implicitly clear especially in an academic context.
A large part of the world doesn't understand this about academic papers or science in general. I don't see how this is clear at all.
I can't agree with this. Maybe they disproved a particular version of learned helplessness, regarding this dorsal raphe nucleus, but it seems clear that that is not the end of the story.
People and animals clearly learn to stop doing actions that have harmful consequences.
> People and animals clearly learn to stop doing actions that have harmful consequences.
But that's not at all what learned helplessness is. On the contrary, learned helplessness is defined by the absence of proactive action that could remove a painful stimulus.
tl;dr Helplessness is the default, what the brain learns is control, examples of "learned helplessness" are actually the brain "unlearning" control.
Honestly doesn't seem like a very meaningful distinction to me.
My understanding is that "learned helplessness" is not "unlearned control" but "not-learned control". Someone who can't read isn't someone who forgot how to, but someone who never learned how to.
I think it's helpful because that means that everyone has to learn control. As opposed to just a few people who would need to learn it to fight their helplessness. So, maybe something that should be taught at school?
I could see it being useful in helping people in these situations.
Teaching someone to have control, as opposed to “unlearning” their helplessness (which presumably if default, can’t be done).
"unlearning" or even "never learned"
I think the distinction is important when trying to fix that. Learning new skill is something different then trying to unlearn something. You probably need to use other methods.
Both the original research and the reversal are a typical case of a narrow scientific truth being misused to paint broad strokes.
As long as you can go back and forth between the too, both are relevant.
Thats kind of interesting when you think of it in the context of big government or monopoly or union monopsony vs individual agency of free markets. Just believing that the market is free gives you the sense of control to act on your ideas vs the alternative of perceiving you have no control because union, or government, or marxism, etc. Causes the failure we have seen in those systems.
Everything in an organism is learned.
If you think it isn't then you're not observing the right timescale.
Read the article. They got the mechanism of “learned helplessness” wrong. It’s actually a “learned lack of control”.
This makes every difference in how to treat people who have this problem. All you have to do is teach people how to feel they have control again.
So what you learn is passivity or apathy. Not sure if this brings us forward, but good to know.
No, that's the gist of the whole article. Some people do not learn how to control their life and I would say that's the important diference. You have to try to learn this new skill not to unlearn "helplessness".
This is a scientific article, not a self-help blog.
There is one place where Learned Helplessness is super prevalent due to loss of control: The behavioral treatment of autism in children.
Applied Behavioral Analysis uses operant conditioning theory and techniques used to coerce behavior and compliance in autistic children. It turns out though, that this “therapy” results in Learned Helplessness and PTSD/cPTSD in 46% of autistic people who later seek further therapy for trauma resulting from the practice.
Autistic people see ABA as torture and abuse. Help me end it.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1__cTL6OryHG5Hr6vwl_s...
A the imho proper and useful concept of "learned helplessness" refers to a situation where someone learns that appearing helpless and asking others for help is the success strategy for achieving any goal. In an environment where this is true, most people will quickly learn this. The situation where this is bad is when a person learns this unconsciously and really believe themselves to be helpless, their learning immediately ruling out even the thought of solving any problems themselves.
There is no reason why both negative and positive stimuli couldn't contribute to such learning. If you reward children every time they ask for help, or punish them every time they try something themselves, or both, there is a big chance they learn helplessness to some degree.
But this is not what it's meant by "learned helplessness". You are describing an unrelated phenomenon. Learned helplessness has nothing to do with feigning helplessness to get what you want; it's instead about giving up and accepting a harmful situation that is perceived as unavoidable.