When Seligman put those three groups in the room with electrified floors and the wall, groups one and two learned at the same pace how to escape. The third group had no control over when those shocks ended. And even though they could escape it, they didn't even try. They had learned there was no point. It's as if the doors to the prisoner left wide open and you decided to just stay in your bunk.
Stuck in a bad situation, even when the prison doors are left wide open, we sometimes refuse to attempt escape. Why is that?
In this episode learn all about the strange phenomenon of learned helplessness and how it keeps people in bad jobs, poor health, terrible relationships, and awful circumstances despite how easy it might be to escape any one of those scenarios with just one more effort. In the episode, you'll learn how to defeat this psychological trap with advice from psychologists Jennifer Welbourne, who studies attributional styles in the workplace, and Kym Bennett who studies the effects of pessimism on health.
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