go through Teach ideological personnel
What is learned helplessness?
definition
Learned helplessness is a psychological state in which a person, after multiple failures or negative experiences, believes that he or she has no control over the outcome of a situation and stops trying to improve or change them.
Here is an example of learned helplessness in the classroom.
lecturer: In this article, teenagers’ biggest fear is not fitting in. Jesse, you talked about acceptance. Now, in order to understand how this happens, what it looks like and what it feels like, we are going to do an activity. This is an activity you do on your own and is not meant to be burdensome on you – these are simple tasks. This is just to give you a feel for what we are going to discuss.
Everyone takes out a short piece of paper, if they wish. I’m going to hand these papers out – face down. Please, no one is writing these; write them on your own paper.
Does everyone have one? Now, if you like, do this one at a time. I’ll tell you when to do it.
See What is cognitive load theory?
lecturer: Everyone turn over the paper and do your own thing. This doesn’t mean it’s hard. These are anagrams – just do the first one. Go ahead and solve it. An anagram is where letters are rearranged to form a word.
Once you’re done, I need to see your hand raised. Keep going, we’ll wait.
Please raise your hands. Just be first. don’t continue
lecturer: Okay, let’s move on to point two. Don’t worry about first place. Go to the second point and solve it. Again, raise your hands when you’re done.
Okay, hands down, everyone. We’ll move on to the third thing. For the third, rearrange the letters and raise your hands as soon as you’re done.
Here’s what you need to know: You’re given two different lists. This side of the room was given three words. The left side of the room looks like this: “bat” – what could the word be? The second word is “lemon” – Brian, what is that word?
See The 8 Most Important Critical Thinking Skills
Brian: “melon.”
lecturer: Correct. These words are simple. But here’s the trick: Both sides of the room were given the same third word, “cinorama,” an anagram for “American.” However, the first two words on your side of the room are unsolvable – they are an impossible task.
I’m sorry about that, but that’s why we do it. I was able to very easily induce a phenomenon called “learned helplessness” on the left side of the room in about five minutes. I want you to think about what’s happening on the left side of the room when you see the right side of the room raising their hands because they accomplished a task.
What happened to you during that time? Jory?
Jory: I feel stupid.
lecturer: You feel stupid. OK what else?
Joel: I felt rushed.
lecturer: You feel rushed. Joel?
Joel: I’m even more confused.
lecturer: You’re even more confused because they’ve figured it out and you’re still struggling. Chelsea?
Chelsea: I’m very frustrated.
lecturer: Frustrated. What happens when you read the third word? Because I’m here to tell you that this side of the room isn’t that much smarter than this side. This is a randomly assigned task. So why do you have greater difficulty with the third word (the same word)? Brian?
Brian: My confidence was shattered.
lecturer: Exactly. What you are experiencing is a term called “learned helplessness.” How many of you have heard this term before?
lecturer: “Learned helplessness” is often used in academic literature. Jory, do you know what this means?
Jory: Basically, they fail or can’t do something once and then they apply it to everything in the future. Therefore, all future missions will be distorted by this.
lecturer: Exactly. That’s what I hope everyone can understand. It’s usually only used in academic research – you’ll see it in educational psychology books, school textbooks. But I will challenge us to think about how learned helplessness applies to social situations. Can someone give me an example of what this would look like? Tasha?
Tasha: Just like when a guy asks a girl out and gets rejected, he doesn’t keep trying. He just stopped asking.
lecturer: that’s right. Now, I want us to think about girls. we talked Resurrection of Ophelia here. Think about how this applies to friendship. Can learned helplessness be induced in friendships? Building and maintaining friendships is difficult – it’s a difficult process.
If a girl sacrifices her morals once to gain approval from a friend or a man, she’s more likely to keep doing it, right?
lecturer: I just want to be clear: if Carl had been victimized once in elementary school, was it possible for him to stand up the next time?
student: No.
lecturer: What will happen next time? What’s next? What we do know – and this is what we’ve been learning – is that there is a cultural pressure on girls to keep quiet. There is a cultural pressure on girls not to be angry and to make their voices heard. So if someone has been hurt once – if Alison has been hurt once – we can take the same concept of learned helplessness and apply it to social relationships.
So, the moral of the story is that it’s important for girls to practice coping with failure. Because when we fail, our instinct is to shut down. When you close yourself off, you won’t be open to learning new ways of relating.
This version separates the speakers, clarifies transitions, and adds punctuation to make the flow clearer. Do you want to edit it further?
Full transcript provided by YouTube
