Oh, that plan?

704.

Image by Martine from Pixabay

Everywhere we go nowadays, we meet Learned Helplessness — or perhaps a better name for it is Taught Pessimism.

To recap: you take three dogs and put them in three cages. Nothing happens to one dog. The other two get mild electric shocks through the floor. One dog can stop the shocks by pushing a bar. The other dog can’t do anything about the shocks.

Then you put the dogs into a shuttle-box one by one: the cage is divided in two, with a low easily jumpable barrier in the middle. Only one side of the cage gives shocks.

What happens? The dog that didn’t get shocks jumps over the barrier into the safe part of the cage. The dog that got stoppable shocks also jumps over the barrier. The dog that got unstoppable shocks just whimpers and stays passive where he is. He doesn’t even try to escape the shocks.

That dog has Learned Helplessness which is very close to depression in humans.

Now this experiment was done in 1965 by a man called Martin Seligman. At the time pretty much all American psychologists were bahaviourists, which means that they believed animals can’t think, they just react to external stimuli. (Yes, I know, what a daft theory?)

This experiment with dogs was the first time that behaviourists were faced with dogs that thought. One dog, after dealing with…