Learned Helplessness

biggest fear for an adolescent is written all the way throughout this text the biggest fear of an adolescent Jesse not fitting in is not fitting in you talked about acceptance now to understand how this happens and how this looks and what this feels like I'm going to have to do an activity this is not your own activity and just this is this is not to tax you these are easy things this is just to kind of get you feeling what we're going to go over so everybody if you would take out a short piece of paper I'm going to pass out these papers and just keep them facedown if you would know one write on these right on your own papers keep them facedown everybody have one if you would just do them one at a time and I will tell you when to do them everybody turn it over just do your own work and this isn't meant to be hard these are anagrams just do the first one only go ahead and solve an an anagram is rearrange the letters to form a word just one just rearrange those letters to form a word when you're done I need to see your hand raised keep going away keep your hands up please just do number one don't go on don't go on it this isn't meant to be okay put your hands down let's just go to number two don't even worry about number one go to number two solve that one again when you're done I want to see your hands up everybody's hands down we're going to go ahead and do number three for number three rearrange the letters and as soon as you do go ahead and put your hand up here's what you need to know you were both given two different lists this side of the room was given these three words the left side of the room here you go they were given back what would the word be the second one they were given lemon Brian the word melon very easy the trick here was both of you were given the third word which was the same the third word was Cinerama which was American your first two words on this side of my classroom were not solvable they were impossible tasks I'm sorry I'm sorry I know but here's what we did this for I was able to induce something called learned helplessness in the left side of the room very easily within about five minutes I want you to think about what happened to you this left side of the room when you saw the right side of the room raising their hands because they already had the task done what happened to you during that time Jori well stupid you felt stupid okay I thought brushed felt rushed Joyal I was even more confused you're even more confused because they all got it and you were still struggling Chelsea frustrated frustrated what happened by the time you got to the third word because I'm here to tell you this side of the room is not significantly more intelligent than this side of the room that was a random assignment so what happened to show the differences why did you have more of a difficult time with the third word was the which was the exact same word Brian my confidence was shot what you experienced was a term called learned helplessness how many have heard of the term before miss your hands learned helplessness is often used in the academic literature to mean what Jori basically they fail once or can't do something one time and then they apply that to everything in the future so all the future applications become skewed by that and here's the thing and this is what I want everybody to understand it's usually only used in the academic research you'll see it in ed psych books you'll see it in school textbooks when they talk about learning but I'm going to challenge us to think about how learned helplessness can actually apply to the social scene can someone give me an example of how that might look Tasha it's like when a guy asks a girl and he gets turned down I'd be willing to keep asking girls out and he stops trying that's correct I want us to think about girls we've talked about reviving Ophelia here I want us to think about how as we have been going through this book how does it apply think about friendships can you induce learned helplessness in friendships because it's tough to actually establish and maintain friends that's a difficult process Jesse if a girl sacrifices for morals once more or a guy which is more likely to do it over yes and I'm just going to put this out there just to be explicit about it if Carl becomes victimized one time in grade school it's he likely to stand up for himself the next time no and then what happens the next time in the next time in the next time what we know that we have been learning about is girls have a cultural pressure to be quiet girls have a cultural pressure not to be angry not to use their voices and so if someone is victimized once if Alison is victimized once we can take that same concept of learned helplessness and apply it to social relationships and so the moral the story is it's very important for girls to practice and to be able to deal with that failure because our gut response what do we do when we fail our gut response is to close down and once you close now you do not open yourself up for learning any new ways for relationships

Channel: zooeygirl

Views: 353,350

Rating: 4.9233871 out of 5

Keywords: learned, helplessness, ophelia, project, psychology, mark, steensland, Teacher, Lesson, School, Education

Id: gFmFOmprTt0

Length: 6min 56sec (416 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 02 2007

Reddit Comments

[u/lgp980]

If you find this interesting you might want to check out John Taylor Gatto or The Ultimate History Lesson. It's one heck of a long journey but well worth time.

[u/epik]

tl;dw

1. Two sides of a classroom are unknowingly given two different sets of words.
2. 1st set are easily solvable anagrams whereas the 2nd set are unsolvable.
3. Teacher asks kids to raise their hands after solving 1 and 2.
4. 3rd word is the same but the 2nd set of students have considerably less putting up their hands because they've been conditioned to the failure while seeing others solve the 1st two so easily.

Teacher at the end adds in a bit about how girls are pressured not to raise their voices and be quiet and how they should try and change that.

Interesting stuff.

[u/WayfarerYouth]

Upvoted respectfully, but i wonder why she chose to say that the moral of the story was for 'girls' and not everyone.

[u/Gormae]

That was incredibly interesting. Thank you.

Sorry people are downvoting.

e: well that turned around quickly.

[u/jcmck0320]

I am a BIG believer in the concept of "learned helplessness." I mention it on a weekly basis because I think it is everywhere.

[u/PorkfatAndSpeed]

Really interesting, 7 minutes worthy to spend.

[u/agentx216]

I agree that the video was very interesting, but I honestly want to ask - so now what?

What do we do with the information? If I have a kid can I do this experiment with him and someone else and by recognizing learned helplessness he can overcome it when it occurs in real life?

Do we write textbooks different or teach differently?

[u/Sir_Fancy_Pants]

One could argue that learned helplessness is actually an efficient survival strategy:

For example: embarking on a competitive endeavour which you fail at repeatedly is most likely to have a real world cause (unbeknownst to you) survival-wise it makes more sense to abandon the struggle and switch to new endeavours.

Although the initial "Proof" of learned helplessness, involved dogs and pain, and some dogs never became helpless

[u/sowhatisit]

I'd flip it on its head and say if boys are victimized, they're pressured to keep quiet. Just look at male sexual assault and rape victims.

For some reason I can't stand these types of non-evidence based feel good talks, all the while short changing half of the population (boys).