The Impact of Attribution Styles on Satisfaction

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Wellborn's work has uncovered that explanatory styles and learned helplessness specifically, they have a deep impact on how people cope with failures at work. So especially how intrinsically satisfied we are with things like our achievements in the workplace. In one of Wellborn's studies, she and her colleagues studied how nurses report very high levels of stress to a Veterans Affairs medical center. They looked at different attribution styles among those people and found it affected their lives and their work.

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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