Dogs That Learned Nothing Mattered Would Not Move to Stop a Shock
People given an annoying noise they could not stop acted the same way the next day, even when stopping it took one hand movement.
Hidden Brain · How to Make a Difference: Part 1Martin Seligman, then 21 and a graduate student, walked into the lab of psychologist Richard Solomon and saw something he found horrifying.
Dogs were strapped into hammocks and given a tone followed by mild to moderate electric shock. Seligman, a dog lover and now a psychology professor in Pennsylvania whose research focuses on human flourishing, hated watching it. The work was Pavlovian conditioning, in which an animal learns to connect a signal with a shock that follows, and then comes to fear the signal itself. On that first day, by design, nothing the dogs did could change what happened.
The surprise came the next day. The same dogs, already shocked the day before, were placed in a different enclosure, called a shuttle box, divided into two sides. A shock began, and all a dog had to do to turn it off was cross to the opposite half. Instead, the dogs just lay there and took it. That failure to move was odd because escape was now simple.
To Seligman, the stillness was the discovery. Other researchers were focused on whether the dogs had learned to fear the tone. He thought they had learned something larger on day one, when shock came no matter what they did. They "had learned that nothing they did mattered," as Seligman put it. That lesson is learned helplessness, the idea that after an uncontrollable bad experience, a person or animal learns that its actions do not matter, so it stops trying.
The idea was tested in people by psychologist Donald Hiroto. On day one, volunteers wore headphones playing a loud, annoying noise. For one group, nothing they did stopped it. For a second group, pressing a button turned it off. On day two, Hiroto used a human version of the shuttle box, which measured about four feet long. A volunteer rested a hand on one side, the noise started, and moving the hand to the other side would stop it. The people who had faced inescapable noise the day before just sat with their hand still and never moved it.
Seligman described three effects: the victims became passive when they later faced a similar unpleasant event, they had trouble learning that they could act even when escape was easy, and they felt sad and anxious. He stressed that the result came not from the pain itself, because the comparison groups had felt the same shock or heard the same noise, but from having no control over it.
That, in Seligman's account, is why the dogs stayed down. They had already concluded that trying would do no good.
Questions people ask
Were the dogs just too scared or hurt to move?
In Seligman's telling, the dogs were physically able to move. They had been through a tone paired with a shock in hammocks, where nothing helped. The next day in the shuttle box, running to the other side stopped the shock, yet they lay still, which he read as a learned lesson rather than an inability to move.
How do we know it was helplessness, not just the shock or noise itself?
The comparison groups felt the same shock or heard the same noise, but they could stop it by acting. The next day, they readily learned to escape. Researchers concluded the key variable was not trauma itself, but whether the subject had control over it.
Did every dog and person give up?
No, not everyone gave up. On average, about five of eight people or animals became passive, while about a third did not. Seligman said asking what protected that resilient third became the turning point of his career.