Learned Helplessness

Individuals with learned helplessness are characterized by their learned inclinations to see that their responses to escape unpleasant situations have no bearings on the outcome. This leads the individuals to hold the expectation that they have no control over the occurrence of the negative stimuli or outcome. Consequently, these individuals adopt a passive, pervasive self-defeating attitude as they fail to unlearn their preconceived mind-sets and relearn new ways to overcome other aversive situations.

The reformulated learned helplessness theory distinguishes between universal versus personal helplessness, global versus specific helplessness, and chronic versus transient helplessness. External attributions are made in universal helplessness, and individuals believe that no one has control over the outcome. In contrast, internal attributions are made in personal helplessness, and individuals believe that other people have control over the outcome even though they themselves do not. Global helplessness happens when individuals extrapolate their passive, helplessness attitude to divergent situations, whereas specific helplessness limits the passive attitude to situations that resemble the original situation. On the other hand, chronic helplessness is continuous, while transient helplessness is temporal in time.

Learned helplessness is applied to explain continued poor performance in students who had experienced failure in school achievement tasks. Accordingly, learned helplessness is manifested in a dysfunctional cognition–behavior–affect system where the components feed into each other.

Fundamentally, students lack motivation as they perceive that they have no control and their actions do not translate into results. Failures may or may not stem from students’ actions or the lack thereof; students do not see themselves as being responsible for their failures. The perceived dissociation between students’ actions and outcomes leads students to believe that their failures cannot be overcome. This, however, may not reflect students’ objective ability. Students attribute their failures to fixed or uncontrollable reasons such as poor ability, rather than malleable and controllable reasons such as inadequate effort. These attributions constitute universal and chronic helplessness. Furthermore, students ruminate about the reasons behind their failures, leading to strong negative and depressive affect.

As further attempts are deemed to be futile, students who display learned helplessness give up easily and do not persist to find solutions to their problems. Such behavioral withdrawal leads to repeated failure outcomes that result in poor psychological adjustment such as shame, resignation, and despair as students condemn their own competencies.

Interventions such as attribution retraining and positive self-regulation skills can potentially help students who suffer from learned helplessness. As it is inevitable for students to experience failures in their learning journey, efforts should be invested to refrain students from slipping into learned helplessness or to provide opportunities for students to experience mastery and success on [Page 953]achievement tasks. Additional support is also needed to help students who display learned helplessness break the cycle of the dysfunctional cognition–behavior–affect system and pull them out of their rut.

See also Attributional Theory; Locus of Control; Motivation; Resilience; Self-Regulation