The Complexity of Learning Helplessness

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Kim Bennett is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. When we experience negative events and explain them as internal, stable, and global, that's when we as humans experience learned helplessness. We have a style that we use to help us create meaning following a negative event. It also happens following positive events, but we tend to spend less cognitive energy thinking through positive things.

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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