kind of problem to work on. The ones who had found the earlier problems
solvable had little difficulty with the new problems. In fact, they did no worsethan a comparison group of participants who received no noise. However,
participants who had felt helpless to turn off the noise performed significantly
worse on the second set of problems. Like the dogs in the shuttle-box, they
appeared to have inappropriately generalized their perception of helplessness
in one situation to a new, controllable situation.
Numerous replications of this experiment confirm that humans are as
susceptible as laboratory animals to learned helplessness (Overmier, 2002;Peterson, Maier, & Seligman, 1993). People learn they are helpless in the initial
uncontrollable setting and can ’t break out of that association in subsequent
situations. On occasion, people can learn to be helpless by simply observing
other people who are helpless (Brown & Inouye, 1978; DeVellis, DeVellis, &
McCauley, 1978). Imagine your reaction when you see several people withability similar to yours trying yet failing to pass an important test. You might
conclude that you also can ’t pass the test, even though you have yet to try
(“There ’s no use in trying; nobody ever passes ”). These feelings of helplessness
might then be generalized to a new situation, and you could suffer fromlearned helplessness without ever experiencing failure yourself.
Some Applications of Learned Helplessness
Since it was first demonstrated in humans, learned helplessness has been stud-
ied in hundreds of investigations and used to explain a wide variety of human
problems. We ’ll look at two of those problems here —well-being among older
individuals and psychological disorders.
Learned Helplessness in the Elderly
We commonly assume in Western society that elderly people deserve to rest
after a lifetime of hard work. Retirement is structured to relieve older indivi-
duals of their daily concerns and responsibilities. Retirement communities areoften designed to take care of the cooking and cleaning and structuring of
daily activities. But is this approach really in the best interests of the retired
person? If we apply a learned helplessness analysis to the situation, we seethat these living situations may be taking away the older persons’ control
over their daily experiences. For formerly active people used to exercising agreat deal of control, living under such conditions may be similar to the expe-rience of research participants presented with uncontrollable noise. And, like
the research participants, the elderly may generalize this perception of uncon-
trollability to other areas of their lives. In short, the lack of motivation andactivity seen in many retired individuals may be a form of highly generalized
learned helplessness.
One team of investigators tested this possibility in a classic study that in-
volved residents on two floors of a retirement residence (Langer & Rodin,
1976). With the administrators ’cooperation, they altered the usual treatment
given to one of these groups. The researchers increased the amount of398 CHAPTER 14 The Behavioral/Social Learning Approach