The phenomenon of learned helplessness— the passivity that often comes after we’ve faced problems that we can’t control—was first studied in dogs. Photograph by Pierre Gleizes/REA/Redux

In May, 2002, Martin Seligman, the Director of the Positive Psychology Center, at the University of Pennsylvania, was giving a lecture at the San Diego Naval Base. It had been sponsored by the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, and some hundred listeners were in attendance. The topic of Seligman’s talk was simple: for a good part of his career, he had studied a concept that came to be known as learned helplessness, the passivity that often comes after we’ve faced problems that we can’t control. That afternoon, he wanted to describe how the data his team had collected over the years could help American personnel—military and civilian alike—“resist torture and evade successful interrogation by their captors,” he recalls. One audience member in particular seemed especially enthused. A year earlier, in December, 2001, he and a colleague had attended a small gathering at Seligman’s house, where 9/11 and anti-terrorism responses had been the topic of conversation. (The colleague had shared his appreciation of Seligman’s work—he was a psychologist himself and Seligman had been an inspiration.) Now, in San Diego, he was taking the opportunity to learn more about the possible direct applications of learned helplessness to the military. Seligman gave it no further thought. Learned helplessness had inspired a lot of people, and many of them, over the years, had expressed their appreciation.

In early December, 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee released its report on the torture techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency in questioning terror suspects since the 9/11 attacks. The report included hundreds of painfully graphic pages, and it revealed that, starting in 2002, many of the most brutal techniques were developed under the direction of two psychologists contracted by the Agency, James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Much of the torture was justified through experimental psychology.

“Neither psychologist had any experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qa’ida, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise,” the report stated. But all the same, they had created what they thought would be a winning approach, “theories of interrogation based on ‘learned helplessness,’ ” which, the report specified, was “the theory that detainees might become passive and depressed in response to adverse or uncontrollable events, and would thus cooperate and provide information.” One of the psychologists—the one who went by the pseudonym Grayson Swigert, who has been identified as Mitchell, “had reviewed research on ‘learned helplessness,’ ” and had “theorized that inducing such a state could encourage a detainee to cooperate and provide information.” He had also, months before he began to advise the C.I.A., attended Seligman’s post-9/11 gathering. He had been the one to come up to speak with the psychologist and to express his admiration.

To understand the nature of learned helplessness, one needs to travel back to Seligman’s early graduate-school days in the laboratory of Richard Solomon at the University of Pennsylvania. When Seligman began his studies, Solomon’s lab was working with dogs on a phenomenon that Ivan Pavlov had first identified as aversive conditioning or avoidance learning. The researchers administered shocks to the animals, accompanied by tones or lights, so that they would come to associate the tone or light stimuli with the shock’s onset, and, in some cases, then learn to avoid the shock by jumping over a barrier. Solomon would then work to see if he could get the dogs to, in effect, unlearn the association. When Seligman arrived at the lab, he noticed that some of the dogs had started to act rather strangely. Instead of trying to figure out how to avoid a new shock, they just sat there. They didn’t even try to figure it out. Teaming up with fellow graduate student Steven Maier, Seligman began to study what was going on.

In a series of experiments, Seligman and Maier first attached dogs to a harness, a kind of rubberized cloth hammock, with holes for the dogs’ legs to dangle free. As the dogs hung, their heads were kept in place by two panels, which they could easily press with their heads. At random intervals, coming between sixty and ninety seconds apart, they would receive a series of shocks to their hind feet. Some of the dogs could control the shocks with a simple press of the head against either of the panels; for others, the head-pressing did nothing. The moment the dogs with the functional panels touched either one, the shock ended. Otherwise, it lasted for thirty seconds to begin with, and for increasingly shorter durations thereafter.

The next day, each dog was set free inside a shuttle box, a two-compartment cage separated by an adjustable barrier. Each time the lights in the box went off, half of the floor would become electrified, shocking the poor animals. But if the dog jumped over the barrier and into the next cage, the shock could be avoided. This time, each dog had the power to end its discomfort quite easily.

When Seligman and Maier analyzed the results, they found a consistent pattern. The dogs that had learned to avoid the shocks by pressing their heads against the panels on the first day were quick to jump the barrier on day two. Not a single dog failed to learn to jump quickly after the first go-around. Those that had been unable to escape the shocks, though, weren’t even trying. They were free to move, explore, and escape—but they didn’t. Two-thirds of them were still hovering in the electrified side of the box by the end of the experiment—and for the remaining third, the average number of trials to learn to escape was just more than seven, out of the total ten. A week later, five of the six dogs that had failed to learn were still unwilling to even try: they once again failed the shuttle-box test. The effect of the harness experiment was been both severe and lasting.

Seligman and Maier called what they were observing “learned helplessness”—the same term that would resurface in Seligman’s lecture and in the Senate torture report. The phenomenon was reliably strong, reliably broad (that is, transferred from one situation to another), and reliably difficult to change once it set in. It was motivational (you no longer even try), emotional (you whimper and grow resigned), and cognitive (you generalize one experience to apply to a broader existence). And it wasn’t confined to dogs. Soon, others picked up on their work, demonstrating similar effects in cats, fish, rats, and the favorite of all experimental animals, college students.

But Seligman didn’t stop his research there. He had told his supervisor that he didn’t believe in causing suffering unless it had some inherent value that would lead to bettering lives, both canine and human. So he and Maier set out to figure out a way to reverse the effect of learned helplessness in the dogs. What they found was that one simple tweak could stop the passivity from developing. When the researchers first put all the dogs in the shuttle box, where the shock was controllable by a jump, and, only then, into the inescapable harness, the effect of the harness was broken: now, even though the dogs were being bombarded by shocks, they didn’t give up. They kept trying to control the situation, pressing the panels despite the lack of feedback. And when they were again put into the box, they didn’t cower. Instead, they immediately reclaimed their ability to avoid shocks.