What is learned helplessness? What are the factors that lead to learned helplessness?

            Learned helplessness means a condition of a human being or an animal in which it has learned to act helplessly, even when the opportunity is restored for it to help itself by avoiding an unpleasant or harmful circumstance to which it has been subjected.

            In his research, Martin Seligman exposed dogs restrained in harness to electric shocks. One group of dogs could turn off the shock by operating a lever while the other group could not. For the dogs in the second group, the ending of the shock was random and beyond their control. Later the dogs were tested in a shuttle box, in which dogs could escape electric shocks by jumping over a low partition. For the most part, the dogs in the second group, who had previously learned that nothing they did had an effect on the shocks, simply lay down and whined. Even though they could have easily escaped the shocks, they did not try because they had developed learned helplessness.

            In humans, Seligman identified three important elements of helplessness: stability, globality and internality. Stability refers to the person's belief that the state of helplessness results from a permanent characteristic. For example, a student who fails a math test can decide that a problem is either temporary (I did poorly on this math test because I was sick) or stable (I never have done well on math tests and never will). Similarly, the person can decide that the problem is either specific (I am no good at math tests) or global (I am dumb). Both stability and globality focus on the student- on internal reasons of failure. The student could have decided that the problem was external (This was a bad math test) instead of internal. This way, a perceived lack of control over a negative stimulus leads to learned helplessness.