Animals in Cages

As is true with many scientific discoveries, they tend to be accidental, and the story of Martin Seligman and some dogs back in 1965 is no different. Seligman wanted to know if dogs could be classically conditioned to react to bells in the same way as if they’d just been shocked, so he put them in a crate with a floor that could be electrified, and shocked them each time he rang a bell. The dogs soon began to react to the bell as if they’d just been shocked. Next however, he put them in a special crate where they could leap to safety to avoid the shock, and this is where the surprise happened.

The dogs wouldn’t leap to safety. It turns out they’d learned from the prior part of the experiment that it didn’t matter what they did. The shock would come anyway. They had learned helplessness. Seligman then tried the experiment with dogs who had not been shocked and they leaped to safety just as expected. But the dogs who had learned helplessness, they just sadly laid down and whimpered.

Fast forward to 1971 where a scientist named Jay Weiss explored this further with rats in cages. He put three rats into three different cages with electrodes attached to their tails and a wheel for each to turn. One rat was the lucky rat. No shocks were involved. Another would get shocks that could be stopped by turning its wheel. The third was the unlucky one. It would get shocked at the same time as the second rat, but it could do nothing about it. The third rat would only stop getting shocked when the second rat turned its wheel. Can you guess what happened?

Photo by David Noah / CC BY 2.0

Even though the two rats that were shocked got shocked at the same time and for the same duration of time, their outcomes were very different. The rat who had the power to stop the pain was just a bit worse off than the rat who experienced no pain at all. However, the rat who had no control whatsoever, stuck with a lever that did nothing, became heavily ulcerated. Like the dog, it too had learned helplessness. The cost of this lesson was its health.

The Power of Perception

Of course humans are not dogs or rats. There’s a bit more complexity when it comes to us and our physiological responses. For us, perception is a key factor. This is where something called attribution comes into play, of which there are three important kinds that lead to humans learning helplessness: internal, stable, and global.

Think back to when you first started school and try to remember your first math test. What if after taking that first test you did poorly on it, and instead of all the other possible reasons for why that could happen, you decided it was because you sucked at math? That’s an internal attribution. Now imagine you applied that attribution to all math tests. That’s a stable attribution. It’s not a one time thing. Now imagine you applied it beyond math to all classes. That’s a global attribution. Consider the results of such perceptions.

Maybe that first math test was simply too hard for everyone in the class. Maybe it wasn’t just you. Maybe your poor grade was due to not studying hard enough, or because you were too hungry or too tired. But instead, because you decided it was your fault and it meant you were stupid, your entire life went down a different path. Even though at any point along the way, you could have escaped that path, just like Seligman’s dogs could have escaped the shocks, what if you had learned helplessness from that first math test?

“We can learn to be helpless in an environment that actually offers us control, and the feeling itself of control can be the difference between a life full of unending stress, and a relatively stress-free life.”

It’s even been shown that we only need to be told there’s nothing we can do in order for us to feel there’s no point in trying. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Tell everyone there’s no point in voting, and fewer people will vote.

What all of this shows is two-fold and extremely important to remember. We can learn to be helpless in an environment that actually offers us control, and the feeling itself of control can be the difference between a life full of unending stress, and a relatively stress-free life.

Fight or Flight

Stress is more than a feeling. Stress is a physiological response, and it has important evolutionary reasons for being. Back in the day, many thousands of years ago, our ancestors who could shift into a kind of emergency gear where long-term higher-order creative thinking shut down, and the body was enabled to think faster, react quicker, be stronger, move faster, run longer, and think only about survival… those were the humans who survived.

We call this now the fight-or-flight response, and where this once incredibly important response was evolutionarily adaptive, it is now maladaptive. We don’t live in that same world anymore where it made so much sense. We aren’t being chased down by lions or being eaten by wolves while sitting in front of our computers in our air-conditioned offices, and yet our fight-or-flight responses are still being activated. In fact, for far too many, daily existence is nothing but fight-or-flight. Long-term stress is a real problem, and I would argue, it’s not just a health problem. It’s a problem for human civilization.

Dr. Robert Sapolsky in the field

Sapolsky and Stress

One of the most knowledgeable scientists in the world in this area is Robert Sapolsky, a pioneering neuroendocrinologist and professor at Stanford University who has spent more than thirty years studying the effects of stress on health, of which there are many. Over the years, Sapolsky has found that long-term stress increases one’s risk of diabetes, cardiac problems, and gastrointestinal disorders. Stress suppresses the immune system. It causes reproductive dysfunction in men and women. It suppresses growth in kids. It affects developing fetuses. Newer evidence even shows it causes faster aging of DNA. But potentially worst of all is what it does to the human mind.

Prolonging fight-or-flight into a chronic condition means that neurons in the brain related to things like learning, memory, and judgment all suffer the consequences thanks to the wide-ranging effects of our double-edged sword stress hormones called glucocorticoids. Recent research has even shown this response made chronic is a self-perpetuating cycle. A constantly stressed out brain appears to lead to a kind of hardening of neural pathways. Essentially, feeling chronic stress makes it harder to not perceive stress, creating a vicious cycle of unending stress.

On top of this, and related back to Weiss’s rats and human attribution theory, is the coping responses of those who are stressed out. Think of the “off-lever” in the second rat’s cage. There are many such levers around us and although they can be effective in reducing our stress levels, many of them are arguably pretty bad off-switches. These responses include acting out against others, otherwise known as displacement aggression or bullying.

Yes, bullying is an effective coping mechanism. As the saying goes, shit rolls downhill, and there’s actually a scientific reason for that other than gravity. In a hierarchy, it is healthier after a loss to start another fight with someone you can beat, than to mope about the loss. The former is the abdication of control, a form of learned helplessness, and the latter is the creation of control, a kind of learned aggressiveness.

“A society full of unhealthy people getting sick more than they otherwise would be, saddled with difficulties learning and remembering, suffering from weakened judgment and short-term survival thinking, and violently turning on each other as a means of coping is not a recipe for success. It’s a recipe for disaster.”

Life in the 21st century is full of both. On the learned helplessness side, there have been an estimated 45,000 suicides per year since 2000, with a sharp rise since 2007, that can all be attributed to the stresses surrounding the economic insecurities of unemployment and underemployment. The U.S. is even confounding the world, with a mysterious and dramatic rise in mortality rates among middle-aged white men and women, who all appear to be drinking and overdosing themselves to death.

On the displacement aggression side, we see bullying of traditionally marginalized groups and a global and marked increase of anti-immigrant sentiment which has already led directly to the election of Donald Trump and as a result, cries for border walls and travel bans. We are seeing a rise in authoritarianism, which is fundamentally a cry for more control and predictability.

A society full of unhealthy people getting sick more than they otherwise would be, saddled with difficulties learning and remembering, suffering from weakened judgment and short-term survival thinking, and violently turning on each other as a means of coping is not a recipe for success. It’s a recipe for disaster, especially faced with species-endangering challenges like climate change that demand long-term thinking. But there is hope, and that hope springs from the same well as our problems.