Learned helplessness
After enough uncontrollable failure, people and animals stop trying even when escape becomes possible.
What it means
Learned helplessness is the passivity and motivational deficit that follows repeated exposure to aversive outcomes that one cannot control, generalizing into a failure to act even once control is restored. Discovered in dogs that no longer escaped shock after earlier inescapable shock, it was extended to humans and became a leading laboratory model of depression. The reformulated version emphasizes attribution: helplessness deepens and spreads when people explain uncontrollable bad events with internal, stable, and global causes. A later neuroscientific revision argues that passivity is in fact the default response to prolonged adversity and that what is truly learned is control — the detection that one can act — which inhibits that default. It matters because it links perceived control to motivation, mood, and resilience, and points to interventions that restore a sense of agency.
Examples
Workers repeatedly overruled on every suggestion eventually stop proposing ideas, even after a new manager invites them.
A pupil who has failed every maths test no matter how much he revises stops opening the book, and keeps it shut even when an easier syllabus arrives.
Someone whose benefit claims are rejected on technicalities time after time gives up applying altogether, even once a letter tells her she now plainly qualifies.
First described in Seligman & Maier (1967); attributional reformulation by Abramson, Seligman & Teasdale (1978).