Several decades ago, two psychologists stumbled upon a phenomenon that revolutionised their
field and changed the way we think about adversity. They called it
‘learned helplessness’ – when faced with a difficult situation that feels
uncontrollable, people tend to act helpless and depressed.
In the wake of a pandemic that has
upended life for millions, this idea feels more relevant than ever. But just as
the concept of learned helplessness helps to explain many of the emotions we’ve
been going through, it has also inspired work that offers positive insights
into how people can remain resilient, even in the face of uncontrollable
adversities. The key is having hope.
Martin Seligman and Steven
Maier discovered learned helplessness in the 1960s, as graduate
students at the University of Pennsylvania, under the supervision of the
experimental psychologist Richard Solomon. Solomon was studying how dogs
learned and responded to fear. His team restrained each dog in a cage with two
compartments, and gave it multiple mild but unpleasant electric shocks, each
time paired with an audible tone. Later, the dogs were untied and the tone was
played – having learned to associate the sound with pain, Solomon predicted the
dogs would jump across to the safe compartment to avoid the pain. But when the
dogs heard the noise, they remained passive, and did not do anything to try to
escape the pain.
As a test of Pavlovian-style
learning, the experiment was judged a failure. But Seligman and Maier reached a
different conclusion: the dogs’ passivity was the crucial finding. During the
earlier part of the experiment, when they had been bound and exposed to a
shock, the dogs whimpered, barked and tried to get away, but it was all in vain
because of the restraints. So, Seligman and Maier believed, the dogs learned
that, when they tried to escape a shock, it did not work. As a result, they
acted helpless the next time they encountered a similar situation, even though
the circumstances had changed and they could jump free if they wanted.
Seligman and Maier tested out their
theory. They arranged three groups of dogs for the initial learning phase: some
were restrained as before while they endured the initial round of shocks paired
with tones, but another group could press a lever to escape to the safe
compartment, and a third group received no shocks at all. Next, all the dogs
were free to move, and the tones were played again. The dogs who had control in
the earlier part of the experiment immediately escaped from the shocks by
jumping across the barrier to the safe side of their cage. The dogs in the
control condition also learned to escape the shocks. But as for the dogs who
had earlier been restrained and made to feel helpless, they did not try to escape.
Seligman and Maier’s seminal findings about
learned helplessness were published in the Journal of Experimental
Psychology in 1967.
Over the next decade, Seligman and
his colleagues replicated the learned helplessness findings first in rodents
and, later, in human beings. Moreover, when it came to provoking feelings of
helplessness in human volunteers, Seligman noticed something important – after
exposing people to non-controllable events, such as unpleasant loud noises or
impossible anagrams, they would often begin to exhibit some of the classic symptoms of depression, such
as feelings of worthlessness, sadness, loss of interest, poor concentration and
fatigue. Ultimately, he concluded that
learned helplessness is a subtype of depression.
But there was a crucial caveat –
whenever the researchers ran these studies, there was always a proportion of
the subjects who were exposed to uncontrollable, aversive events, but did not give
up trying to exert control. Even though they learned that nothing they did
mattered to stopping an aversive event, they kept trying to make their
situation better. Also, some of the subjects who did give up, becoming helpless
for a time, bounced back immediately and began to act with agency in later
parts of the experiments. The question was – why? Why did uncontrollable
adversities render some people helpless while others remained resilient?
Two researchers became increasingly
preoccupied with that question – one was Seligman’s graduate student Lyn
Abramson, the other was the Oxford psychiatrist John Teasdale. Teasdale and
Abramson pointed out that being made to feel helpless is not enough to produce
depression. What also matters is how people make sense of their helplessness –
the attributions they make. Do they blame themselves or do
they blame the experimenter? Do they generalise their helplessness to life in
general, or just to the specific situation in the lab? How people interpreted
the experience – the story they weaved – was the critical missing ingredient of
the theory.
Seligman teamed up with Abramson and
Teasdale and together they found there
are three ways people can interpret what happens to them: they can form
attributions that are either permanent (eg, I will always be helpless
and nothing I do will ever matter) vs temporary (eg, I was helpless
in that specific circumstance, but what I do at other times still matters);
specific (eg, related only to anagrams) vs universal (eg, all problems); and
internal (eg, it’s my fault) vs external (eg, it’s the
fault of the world or someone else).
As Seligman would later put it,
different people have different ‘explanatory styles’. Some people have a
‘pessimistic explanatory style’, and make negative attributions about aversive
events (ie, internal, universal, permanent), and they are more vulnerable to
depression. Other people have ‘optimistic explanatory styles’ – when bad things
happen, they don’t blame themselves but the world, and they see the adversity
as temporary, local and specific. Their story about the world and their place
in it is much more hopeful, and they are more resilient.
In later work, Abramson and her
colleagues reformulated the learned helplessness theory of
depression as the ‘hopelessness theory of depression’. Hopelessness depression
emerges when people experience a negative life event, such as losing a job, and
draw pessimistic conclusions about the causes and consequences of the event,
and what the event says about who they are as a person. They might believe they
are helpless to change their circumstances and will never find employment, for instance,
and that they’re worthless as a result – thoughts that depress and demoralise
them.
Over the years, research has
confirmed the connection between hopelessness and mental illness. Aaron Beck,
the founder of cognitive behavioural therapy, found that a sense of hopelessness is a key driver of
suicide. Conversely, having a sense of hope contributes to better overall
mental and physical health. For example, people high in hope are able to tolerate pain for
longer periods; they report higher levels of wellbeing after someone they love
dies; when confronted with a stressful situation, they are able to think more
creatively and flexibly about how to overcome it; and, as they move through a
difficult period of their life, they’re more likely to identify silver linings.
People high in hope also perform better academically, are less prone to
loneliness, and – above all – are less likely to succumb to helplessness and
despair when adversity strikes.
All of this points to a powerful
insight – that instilling or restoring a sense of hope in people might help
them build resilience and alleviate their emotional suffering. The next
question is how? How can people build a sense of hope, especially during hard
times?
The
work of Seligman and Abramson suggests that changing
the stories we tell ourselves about adversity can help instil hope. Rather than
blaming yourself for losing a job or feeling sluggish, you can blame the COVID-19 pandemic;
rather than focusing on the areas where life feels out of control, such as new
strains of the virus, and concluding that life is unpredictable and chaotic,
you can focus on those things that you can control, such as your routines,
habits and the way you treat other people. You can remind yourself that this
adversity, like all adversities, is temporary and will end at some point.
Another way to build hope requires
rethinking its ordinary meaning. You might consider hope a form of wishful
thinking, a positive and perhaps naive expectation that everything will turn
out OK in the end. But according to ‘hope theory’, developed by the late American psychologist Charles
Snyder, hope is not blind optimism. It’s about having goals for one’s future,
agency or ‘goal-directed energy’ (believing the goals are attainable) and specific
‘pathways’ or plans for how to reach those goals. In other words, hopeful
people are not like Pollyanna, rather they feel in control of their lives and
exhibit a sense of agency in their pursuits – the opposite of feeling helpless.
Drawing on Snyder’s work,
psychologists have developed interventions to instil hope. For example,
therapists who practise ‘hope therapy’ help their clients conceptualise clear
goals for their future, map out routes to pursue those goals, and reframe
obstacles as challenges to be overcome. Rather than focusing on the client’s
past failures, the therapist focuses on their successes, which can serve as
models for future goal pursuits. In one study testing an eight-session group-therapy hope
intervention, participants who were taught hope-building skills subsequently
reported a greater sense of meaning, agentic thinking and self-esteem, and
lower levels of anxiety and depression, as compared with a waitlist control
group. They also reported lower levels of anxiety and depression
post-treatment.
Even in the bleakest of times, hope –
of the kind articulated by Snyder – can make a positive difference. Consider
the work of the physician and ethicist Chris Feudtner at the Justin Michael
Ingerman Center for Palliative Care at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Working with parents whose children have life-threatening illnesses, Feudtner
has found that, while they all of course wish desperately that their children
could be cured, it is those parents high in hope who tend to adjust better to
the reality of the situation. In one of his studies, it was actually the more hopeful parents who were
more likely to decide to limit medical interventions as their child’s condition
worsened, suggesting that having hope allowed them
to relinquish a goal that was no longer attainable, and to adopt another
focused on alleviating suffering.
Moreover, Feudtner found that
a simple question could help kindle hope in parents. After presenting them with
the horrible news that their child’s condition was worsening, incurable or
terminal, he asked them: ‘Given what you are now up against, what are you
hoping for?’ Parents tended to respond unrealistically at first, such as
wishing for a miracle cure or to awaken from a bad dream. But then, when
Feudtner gently asked them ‘what else’ they might be hoping for, their
responses became more grounded and attainable. ‘The subsequent answers,’ he
writes in ‘The Breadth of Hopes’ (2009), ‘tend to be qualitatively different
from the initial hopes: they are more oriented to pain or suffering and the
hope of relief, to the longing for home and the hope of homecoming, or to
surviving not in a physical but in a spiritual sense and the hope of finding
meaning and connection.’ It’s a most powerful example of how identifying goals
that are attainable, and seeing pathways to them, can restore a healing sense
of control, in this case bringing a
measure of comfort to parents facing the most terrible adversity.
From
that initial research on helplessness in the 1960s have sprung decades of
findings with a more uplifting message. Circumstances, no matter how bad, do
not have to defeat us. You have the capacity to adopt more hopeful patterns of
thinking in the face of adversity, and to adjust and pursue your goals, even
amid hardship. If you can maintain hope in these ways, it will help you find
the courage, strength and resilience to ride out the inevitable storms that
life brings.
Hope is the antidote to helplessness. Here’s how to cultivate it | Psyche Ideas
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