Psychological Helplessness
Every individual wants to achieve success, though one differs in the level of perseverance one exhibits in the journey towards achieving one’s goals. Some accept defeat or helplessness on encountering difficult circumstances, whereas some see these failures as learning opportunities and bounce back from these adversities and continue their journey towards success with renewed enthusiasm. The subject of helplessness and its remedies has caught the attention of psychologists and researchers over the past few decades.
Martin Seligman, a pioneer in the field of positive psychology has done significant research on ‘Learned Helplessness’. While experimenting on rats in a platform, he accidentally stumbled upon an interesting
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This can be explained in terms of pessimistic and optimist explanatory styles (Seligman, 1972). In case of bad events, when individuals are asked the question that who is responsible for it. Some people tend to use internal explanations blaming themselves for the bad event while some tend to blame the external environment for the cause. The former tend to show more helplessness than the latter. One must note here that internality-externality is a continuum and people place themselves on different points of this continuum. The next question focuses on the duration of bad events. While pessimists tend to see these bad events as permanent, optimists believe that the bad events are unstable and will be short-lived. Lastly, the discussion shifts to the pervasiveness of the bad events. This can be explained with the help of an example. If suppose a student has scored bad in a subject exam, the pessimist here will try to give a global explanation that he/she will score bad in other exams too and will become panicky. On the other hand, the optimist will attribute a specific explanation to the situation and will try to give more dedicated effort in the preparation for other subjects so as to score well in
Why is it that we as human beings feel the need to blame someone for every negative situation, which occurs? If we really look at the situation with any great depth, we may discover that an almost endless amount of things may be 'blamed' for the tragedy blaming an individual is pointless - only fate can really be blamed.
Most people throughout the world strive for success in each task they take on, and along with this, many reasons contribute to why they succeed or not. If a person does not succeed, they may automatically blame themselves because of their level of strength. Others may blame themselves for not having enough knowledge about what they are trying to succeed at. The real reason that people may not succeed, however, is their lack of determination and happiness throughout his/her journey that is demonstrated in the book Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell.
Most times, the lasting result becomes increasingly sweet with realization, metamorphosis, and helpful action. As each individual experiences despair, resulting action varies. Yet no matter how minuscule or substantial the problem at large is, the presence of acting accordingly to cease the problem remains perpetual. With collaboration of ideas and seeking guidance from groups, one comes to find assurance and advice that of which unveil the truth and the knowing it takes to remove any problem all together. An immediate chain like response occurs, almost like a wake up call, sounding loudly and abruptly, even after snooze was set, to clearly dictate that action needs to be taken. When proper action is taken, then miraculous life will
Estrem, Pauline. "Why Failure Is Good for Success." Thesis. N.d. (n.d.): n. pag. SUCCESS. Success Magazine, 2013. Web. 02 Jan. 2014
So while randomness and luck greatly affect our chances of being successful, persistence can help lower our rate of failure. Some factors may hinder our opportunity to become successful, but ultimately we have far more control over our fates.
Success and failure seem to be pretty distinct opposites, but many times the differences between success and failure aren’t as obvious as we may think them to be. Sometimes a failure can be turned into a success if you are willing to look back at them, and are open to learning from them. Many times, one’s attitude toward a failure can determine whether or not anything is learned from it. Those who remain upbeat and positive after a failure may be able to get something out of it, but those who just don’t think about it and ignore it won’t get anything from it.
Although blame appears to be an effective coping mechanism to provide reasons for uncontrollable circumstances,
“The learned helplessness phenomenon is proposed as a model for the emotional numbing and maladaptive passivity sometimes following victimization” (Peterson 103). Learned helplessness as stated in Martin Seligman’s research was basically people experience learned help-lessness as thinking that the test they had was impossible. According to what I researched, making them have a tendency to give up easily or fail more often at somewhat eas¬ier tasks. Learned helplessness is more likely to result from situations where fail¬ure is uncontrollable.
“Learned helplessness is a phenomenon containing three components: contingency, cognition, and behavior. Contingency addresses the uncontrollability of the situation. Cognition refers to the attributions that people make regarding their situation or surroundings of which they are a part. Behavior allows individuals to decide whether they will give up or proceed with the obstacle set before them” (Peterson, Maier, & Seligman, 1993; Firmin, Hwang, Copella, & Clark, 2004). When a student thinks about college he must take either the ACT or the SAT test to be admitted into the college. Students have a lot of decisions to make that can be stressful. Failure is an aspect that students fear and can determine whether they will succeed in life.
Perseverance commonly occurs in everyone’s lives. Every single person that exists persists towards a goal, and every person has persisted a goal for as long as people have existed. However, even though perseverance usually resonates with pursuant people, it is also what makes people stand out the most as well. No person becomes a great and influential individual by half-trying something, and then giving up. Everyone must learn to push through tough times and failure to get anywhere in life. No matter what the situation may be, pursuance remains the key component for one’s accomplishments and goals because one must try first before they can achieve their goals; whether that goal becomes survival, being a hero, becoming a dominant administrator,
I must say that my personal strengths lies within my determination, perseverance, and persistence to work hard and become a better person. Throughout my whole life, I have used individuals and their compliments to motivate myself to become better, faster, and stronger as a person, hoping to exceed their expectations. That might sound shallow, but those individuals are the fuel that keeps me from ever giving up. On the other hand, my personal challenges consists of the fact that I am a weakness to disappointment. Disappointment from a mentor whom I respect can stop me in my tracks, leaving me in state where that is the only thing I can think about. As a result, I work hard to not just stop disappointment but to prove them that their disappointment in me is just temporary. However, I hope you do not come to conclusion that my hard work is only to please other but to please myself and the personal expectation that I
Susan Schenkel, author of “Giving Away Success” says “there are many ways we discount ourselves. Three of the most common patterns are: 1) emphasizing the negative 2) automatically attributing success to something other than ability, and 3) automatically blaming failure on lack of ability” (Schenkel, 6). Schenkel explains how women also end up being susceptible to falling into helplessness as a result of uncontrollability, which is the belief that nothing can be done to rectify their current state of misfortunes. As a result they end up withdrawing, for example, stopping, quitting or escaping from making ardent efforts to deal with their existing problems. A second thing they tend to do is to avoid getting into tough situations. They do this by shying away from confrontation with the difficulty they feel unable or unwilling to handle (Schenkel, 19). As a result of this helplessness disrupts behavior such as undermining motivation, interfering with ability to learn and creating emotional distress (Schenkel, p. 24).
The quality of unimaginable success is determined by grit. Despite confronting difficult life circumstances that delay the process individuals who are passionate, intelligent, and dedicated to one’s own success will continue maintaining consistency throughout their journey. Success is measured by an individuals’ commitment to effectively work hard towards life-changing goals. In the journal article “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-term Goals,” Angela L. Duckworth conducts several studies in order to convey human’s capacity for higher achievements while still enduring challenges and failure. Although Duckworth’s research has proven that individuals who are less gritty tend to shift trajectory, I believe working hard and keeping “stamina” is essentially the key to achieving your goals (1088).
The theory of learned helplessness sought to account for the passive behavior subjects exhibited when placed in an uncontrollable environment. In the late 60's and early 70's, Martin Seligman, a famous researcher in the field of psychology, conducted a series of experiments in which dogs were placed in one of two types of cages. In the former cage, henceforth referred to as the shock cage, a bell would sound and the experimenters would electrify the entire floor seconds later, shocking the dog regardless of location. The latter cage, however, although similar in every other respect to the shock cage, contained a small area where the experimenters could administer no shock. Seligman observed that while the dogs in the latter cage learned to run to the nonelectrified area after a series of shocks, the dogs in the shock cage gave up trying to escape, even when placed in the latter cage and shown that escape was possible.
In conclusion, humans use attribution to explain causal relationships in the world and to explain these relationships situational or dispositional factors are used. The two errors in attribution that are most commonly made are the fundamental attribution which involves overestimating the role of dispositional factors and underestimating the role situational factors and self- serving bias which is when people take credit for their successes by attributing them to dispositional factors, and dissociate themselves from their failures by associating them situational factors.