Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [216]
Seligman had just gone to his professor’s laboratory for the first time and found him and his graduate assistants deeply troubled. Their experimental dogs wouldn’t perform. The dogs had been conditioned by tone and shock given together until they associated the tone with the shock. Now they were in a “shuttlebox,” a large cage with a low fence dividing it into two compartments, where they were being subjected only to the tone. When dogs are put in such a box and given a shock in one compartment but not the other, they rapidly learn to leap the fence to escape the shock; the experiment was intended to find out whether they would do the same when they heard the tone without the shock. But at the tone, these dogs lay still and whimpered. No one could understand it, but young Seligman had a sudden thought. While the dogs were being conditioned to tone and shock, they couldn’t escape the shock; they had learned that nothing they did mattered. Now, in a situation where they could have escaped the shock, they still acted as if nothing they did would help.56
With a fellow student, Steven Maier, and later with another colleague, H. Bruce Overmier, Seligman conducted a series of experiments in the creation of learned helplessness. A central experiment had the dogs placed, one at a time, in a cage where, harnessed and unable to escape, they received a series of electric shocks to their feet through the metal floor. Then each dog, and a number of others that had not had the shock treatment, were put in a shuttlebox where, from time to time, a light would go on in the compartment the dog was in, followed in ten seconds by a shock. All the animals quickly associated the light with an imminent shock; when it went on, the untreated dogs scrambled about wildly and soon found that they could escape the shock by jumping over the fence into the other chamber, but the dogs that had been subjected to unavoidable shock stayed put and let themselves be shocked without making any effort to escape. They had developed the expectation that nothing they could do would avoid the shock; they had learned to be helpless.57
That seemed to explain learned helplessness in human beings as well as dogs. But Overmier and Seligman went further. Depression in human beings, they boldly suggested, might often be due less to actual inability to cope with problems or sorrows than to learned helpless-ness—the feeling or belief that there is nothing to be done. This theory was immediately rebutted by psychologists and psychiatrists, who pointed out that some people never become helpless when bad things happen to them; some do but bounce back rapidly; some become helpless not only in the given situation but in new and different ones; some blame themselves and some blame others for their misfortunes.
Seligman, in collaboration with one of his critics, a British psychologist named John Teasdale, and another colleague, set out to find a better explanation of human depression. They worked out a new hypothesis combining learned helpless and locus of control. When human beings have painful experiences they can do nothing about, they either interpret them as the result of external forces or blame themselves, and the erroneous latter interpretation induces depression.58 The team tested the hypothesis by means of a complicated locus-of-control questionnaire; the information supported the hypothesis, and after their study was published in 1978, a rash of similar and confirmatory studies—more than three hundred in the next twenty years—with dogs, rats, and people confirmed and extended it.59
One such study, for instance, rated a group