Learned Helplessness: What the Dogs Learned, and What They Did Not

The dog experiments and the triadic design

The phenomenon was noticed by accident in Richard Solomon's laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania: dogs that had received Pavlovian conditioning with shock while restrained in a hammock were later moved to a shuttle box to learn escape and avoidance, and they would not learn. Bruce Overmier and Martin Seligman made it an experiment. Dogs in the hammock received 64 shocks that nothing they did could end. A day later each was placed in a two-compartment shuttle box where a signal was followed by shock, jumping the barrier ended the shock, and an unescaped shock ended on its own after a minute. Naive dogs jumped within a few trials. Most of the pre-shocked dogs ran about and howled during the first shock or two, then lay down, whined, and took the full minute, trial after trial; a dog that happened to jump and end a shock often failed to jump again. Two further details mattered later: the deficit from a single session was gone when the test was delayed two days, and dogs paralyzed with curare during the hammock shocks, who could not have learned any competing movement, showed it anyway.^[1]

The decisive experiment is Seligman and Maier's, published the same year, and it used what became known as the triadic design. One group of dogs could end each hammock shock by pressing a panel with its head. A second group was yoked to the first: each yoked dog received exactly the shocks its partner received, starting and stopping at the same moments, but its own presses did nothing. A third group received no hammock shocks. In the shuttle box the next day, the escape dogs and the naive dogs learned normally; most of the yoked dogs did not.^[2] The escape and yoked groups had received identical shocks; the only difference was whether responding had mattered. Shock had not produced the deficit. Uncontrollable shock had.

The same paper reported the finding that would matter most fifty years later. Dogs given escape training in the shuttle box first, and only then inescapable shock in the hammock, did not become helpless; Seligman and Maier called this immunization.^[2] Later work in the same laboratory found that helpless dogs recovered if they were dragged across the barrier on a leash, again and again, until moving reliably ended the shock and they began to move on their own.^[3]

The original theory: learning that responses do not matter

Maier and Seligman's 1976 review laid the theory out. When shock ends whether or not the animal responds, the animal learns that the two are independent and carries that expectation into the next situation, where it does three things. It lowers the tendency to initiate responses at all (a motivational deficit); it makes the animal slow to notice that a response has worked when one does (an associative deficit); and it produces agitation followed by a flat passivity (an emotional deficit).^[3]

This was a cognitive claim made in an operant laboratory, and much of the review defends it against plainer alternatives. Exhaustion or physical damage? The yoked dogs had received the same shocks as dogs that escaped normally. A learned habit of holding still, accidentally reinforced by shock ending? Curarized dogs, who could not hold still or do anything else, became helpless too. Mere inactivity? An inactive animal that stumbles into a successful response should learn from it, and helpless animals did not. Immunization was the strongest card: one expectation appeared to protect against another. The theory also implied that animals can learn the absence of a relation between behavior and outcome, which a strict reading of the law of effect, in which consequences stamp responses in and nothing else is learned, has no room for.^[3]

Learned helplessness in people

Donald Hiroto brought the design to college students in 1974, with loud noise through headphones in place of shock. One group could switch the noise off with a button; a yoked group heard the same noise, and its presses did nothing; a third group heard no noise. The test was a "finger shuttle box," in which sliding the hand from one side to the other stopped the noise. Students who had heard escapable noise, or none, learned to slide their hands; those who had heard inescapable noise were slower to escape and more often never did. Students who scored as "externals" on a locus-of-control scale, and students told the test was a matter of chance rather than skill, were more likely to fail.^[5]

Hiroto and Seligman then crossed two kinds of uncontrollable pretreatment, inescapable noise and unsolvable concept-formation problems, with two kinds of test, noise escape and anagram solving. Helplessness crossed over: inescapable noise impaired anagrams, and unsolvable problems impaired noise escape. Whatever people had acquired behaved like a general expectation.^[6] Rats, meanwhile, became the standard animal: a rat in a restraining tube receives tailshock it can end by turning a small wheel, its yoked partner receives the identical shock and can do nothing, and both are later tested in a shuttle box.^[7]

The human effects were real but modest, and they moved with what subjects were told and believed about the task, which nothing in the dog data had led anyone to expect. Explaining that took a different kind of theory.

The attributional reformulation and hopelessness theory

Even before the reformulation, Carol Dweck had shown that what a child concludes from failure can be changed. In 1975 she worked with twelve children whom school staff had identified as reacting to failure with a collapse in performance. Over twenty-five sessions, half received "success only": problems they could solve, and nothing else. The other half received attribution retraining: a few problems were arranged to be failed, and after each failure the trainer told the child that it came from not trying hard enough. When failure was then reintroduced, the success-only children still fell apart, some worse than before; the retrained children held or improved their performance.^[8] A diet of success had taught nothing about failure. It was a small study, and the reformulation gave it a theory.

Abramson, Seligman, and Teasdale published the attributional reformulation in 1978. The original theory, they argued, could not say why helplessness in people sometimes cost self-esteem and sometimes did not, why it was sometimes confined to one task and sometimes spread to everything, or why it sometimes passed in an hour and sometimes lasted. Their answer: when people find an outcome uncontrollable they ask why, and the attribution determines what follows. The reformulation also distinguished universal helplessness, in which no one could have controlled the outcome, from personal helplessness, in which others could have and I could not.^[9]

A habit of explaining bad events by internal, stable, global causes was proposed as a vulnerability: not a cause of depression by itself, but a style that turns bad events into broad and lasting helplessness.^[9]

In 1989 Abramson, Metalsky, and Alloy revised the theory again into hopelessness theory. The proximal cause of a proposed subtype, hopelessness depression, is hopelessness itself: the expectation that desired outcomes will not occur, or aversive ones will, and that nothing one does will change it. Farther back sit negative life events and a tendency to read them as stable and global, as having severe consequences, and as saying something bad about the self. Helplessness became one ingredient of hopelessness, and internal attributions were demoted to a role in self-esteem.^[10] It is a diathesis-stress theory about people, tested with questionnaires and prospective studies, a long way from a hammock in Philadelphia.

Learned helplessness and depression: a model, not a diagnosis

Seligman proposed learned helplessness as a laboratory model of depression in his 1975 book Helplessness, on the strength of parallels: helpless animals and depressed people both initiate less behavior, are slow to recognize that their actions have had effects, and show a flattening of mood; both conditions, he argued, can follow loss of control over important outcomes; and both, in the model, are relieved by experiences in which action reliably produces results and prevented by prior mastery.^[11] Peterson, Maier, and Seligman revisited the model two decades later and concluded, with care, that it captures some features of some depressions, in particular those that follow uncontrollable bad events and are accompanied by hopelessness.^[12]

Several things should be kept straight. A model is an analogy that generates hypotheses; an animal cannot be diagnosed with a mood disorder. The human laboratory effects come from a few minutes of noise or unsolvable puzzles and are small and short-lived. Hopelessness theory is about a subtype, and its distal cause is a cognitive style plus bad events. And Maier and Seligman noted in 2016 that the animal pattern, which includes exaggerated fear and reduced social exploration as well as passivity, looks at least as much like anxiety as like depression.^[4]

The 2016 reversal: passivity is the default, control is learned

From the 1990s Maier's laboratory took the triadic design into the rat brain. Uncontrollable tailshock strongly activates the serotonin neurons of the dorsal raphe nucleus in the brainstem, far more than identical controllable shock does. The activation leaves the nucleus sensitized for a period afterward, and the serotonin it then releases in its targets produces the behavioral effects: failure to escape in a shuttle box, exaggerated conditioned fear, reduced social exploration. Blocking the activation during inescapable shock prevented these effects, and activating the nucleus pharmacologically, with no shock at all, produced them.^[7] The passivity had a circuit, and the circuit required no learning.

But the dorsal raphe cannot tell whether a shock is controllable; it receives the shock either way. Amat and colleagues found the detector in 2005 in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex. When they inactivated it during escapable shock, escapable shock behaved like inescapable shock: the dorsal raphe was activated and the rats later showed the full set of deficits, even though every shock had ended by their own wheel turn.^[13] Later work found the converse: activating the region during inescapable shock prevented the deficits.^[4] The prefrontal cortex detects that a response controls the stressor and inhibits the dorsal raphe. Without that signal, the raphe's response is simply what happens.

Immunization got a mechanism too. An experience of control changes the prefrontal circuit so that, in a later stressor no response can end, the dorsal raphe is inhibited anyway; and because control over one stressor protects against a different one later, what the circuit learns is not tied to the wheel. That is why the immunized dogs of 1967 could take inescapable shock in a hammock and still jump in a shuttle box.^[4]

In the fiftieth-anniversary paper Maier and Seligman drew the conclusion. The dogs in the inescapable condition had not learned that responses were useless; they had not needed to learn anything. Prolonged aversive stimulation activates the dorsal raphe, and the passivity and fear that follow are the unlearned default. What was learned, in the escapable condition, was that a response worked, and that learning inhibited the default. The original theory, they wrote, had it backward.^[4] The shuttle box could never have shown this, because a test that measures only whether the animal jumps cannot tell a learned expectation of no control from an unlearned failure to engage. The wider neuroscience of reinforcement has its own page.

Where helplessness sits in operant conditioning

The shuttle box is an escape and avoidance task, so what a helpless animal fails to acquire is behavior maintained by negative reinforcement: a jump that removes the shock. Procedure and process should be kept apart. Inescapable shock is a procedure, aversive stimulation delivered independently of behavior; learned helplessness names the process, the later failure of escape and avoidance learning, and, until 2016, the theory of it. Inescapable shock is not punishment, because punishment is a consequence of a response and inescapable shock is a consequence of nothing.

Helplessness and avoidance are mirror-image failures of contact with a contingency. Solomon, Kamin, and Wynne's well-trained avoiders kept jumping after the shock was switched off, because a dog that jumps early never finds out that the contingency has changed; what stopped them was a barrier that prevented the jump.^[14] A helpless dog never finds out that a contingency exists, because it does not respond, and when a response does end the shock the relief fails to strengthen it; what worked was a leash that made the dog move.^[3] In both cases behavior is insulated from its consequence, and in both the remedy was forced contact. See avoidance learning and extinction.

The other mirror image is learned industriousness. Robert Eisenberger's 1992 review concluded that reinforcing high effort on one set of tasks increases effort and persistence on unrelated ones, because the sensation of effort, repeatedly paired with reinforcement, loses aversiveness and becomes a conditioned reinforcer; reinforcing low effort does the opposite.^[15] Helplessness follows when effort has not mattered; industriousness follows when it has.

What this means in practice

The literature supports a small number of practical statements. First, controllability matters separately from the amount of stress: two animals with identical shock histories differ afterward according to whether their responses worked. Second, experience of control is protective: it prevented helplessness in 1967, it undid it, and on the 2016 account the prefrontal learning that a response works stays available in later stressors the animal cannot control. Maier and Seligman treat such experiences, especially early ones, as the practical lesson of the whole literature.^[4]

Turned into arrangements, the suggestion looks like this. In a classroom, a student who is behind meets tasks at a level where effort produces success, which is what shaping is for, rather than a run of failures no effort can change. In dog training, the dog's behavior is what produces the outcomes. In a workplace, feedback follows what a person did rather than arriving on its own timetable. For parents, the point is not to remove hardship but to keep a child's actions connected to results. None of these is an experiment; they are the shape the evidence suggests, and the evidence comes from rats, dogs, and a few minutes of noise. Ordinary setbacks are not inescapable shock.

Common misreadings, and what the evidence does not show

Common misreadings

• "Helplessness is learned." The name teaches this, and on the evidence it is backward: passivity under prolonged uncontrollable stress is the default, and control is what has to be learned.^[4]
• "Helpless means lazy." Dogs paralyzed with curare became helpless without moving at all, dogs dragged across the barrier recovered, and failing to learn from a successful response is not a matter of effort.^[1][3]
• "It is a kind of punishment." Punishment is a consequence of a response. Inescapable shock is a consequence of nothing; that is the point of the design.
• "Any failure produces it." The procedure is uncontrollability, not failure. Dweck's retraining used deliberate failure, paired with the message that effort could change it, and it helped.^[8]
• "It is permanent." After one session the dogs' deficit was gone within two days; immunization prevented it; forced exposure reversed it.^[1][2][3]
• "Depressed people have learned helplessness." The model captures some features of some depressions. It is not a diagnosis.^[12]

What the evidence does not show

• That the human laboratory effect is the same process as the animal one. The human effects are small, brief, and sensitive to instructions and beliefs; the reformulation exists because the dog theory did not fit them.^[5][9]
• That an attributional style causes depression on its own. Hopelessness theory is a diathesis-stress proposal about a subtype.^[10]
• That the circuit found in rats maps directly onto human mood disorders. Its authors note that its behavioral signature looks as much like anxiety as like depression.^[4]
• That telling someone they have control is the same as having it. Instructions do move the human laboratory effect, but the animal evidence and immunization concern actual contingencies between responses and outcomes.^[5][2]
• That passivity in general is learned helplessness. Most passivity has a history of ordinary reinforcement and extinction behind it; the term adds nothing unless uncontrollable aversive events are in that history.

Key takeaways

• Dogs given identical shocks differed afterward only by whether their responses had ended them, and only the dogs without control later failed to escape. Uncontrollability, not shock, produced the deficit.
• The original theory held that the animals learned that responses and outcomes were independent; immunization by prior control and recovery through forced exposure were its strongest supports.
• In people the effect was modest and moved by beliefs, which led to the attributional reformulation (internal, stable, global) and then to hopelessness theory, a diathesis-stress account of a proposed subtype of depression.
• Learned helplessness is a laboratory model of some features of some depressions, not a diagnosis.
• The neuroscience reversed the theory: uncontrollable stress activates the dorsal raphe by default, and the medial prefrontal cortex learns control and inhibits it. Helplessness is not learned; control is.
• Controllability matters separately from the amount of stress, experiences of control are protective, and learned industriousness is the mirror image.

Check yourself

Two dogs are strapped side by side. Every shock the first dog receives is copied exactly to the second. The first can end each shock by pressing a panel; the second cannot. The next day both are tested in a shuttle box. What is the design called, what does each dog do, and what does the design rule out?

The triadic design, once a third, unshocked group is added. The first dog escapes normally; the second mostly does not. Because the two received identical shocks, the design rules out the shock itself, exhaustion, and physical damage as explanations, and leaves only the difference in control.

A colleague says, "The dogs learned to be helpless, so we should teach people that they aren't." What does the 2016 account change about the first half of that sentence, and what does it leave intact?

It reverses the first half: the dogs in the inescapable condition did not learn helplessness; passivity was the default, and it was the escapable dogs that learned something, namely control. It leaves the practical direction intact and strengthens it: experiences in which responses actually work, before or after uncontrollable stress, are what protect, and the prefrontal circuit that carries that learning is what inhibits the default.

A student fails a quiz and says, "I'm just bad at this." Using the 1978 reformulation, which features of that attribution predict a broad and lasting effect, and what did Dweck's retraining change?

"Bad at this" is internal (about me) and stable (a trait); whether it is global depends on how much "this" covers. Internal attributions bear on self-esteem, stable ones on how long the helplessness lasts, global ones on how far it spreads. Dweck taught children to attribute failure to insufficient effort, which is unstable and changeable, after which their performance survived failure, while a diet of success alone did not help.

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