Individuals have been known to suffer from learned helplessness. This video explains an experiment where scientists found how someone can stop taking action by learning to become helpless. But can organizations also go through such dark periods of learned helplessness? Find out in this video.
If you would read rather than watch, here is the transcript.
Transcript
Hi, I am Ankush Chopra. Did you know that sometimes individuals and organizations learn to become helpless? They stop trying to change their life conditions and give in. Why does that happen? Let’s find out.
The Experiment
Scientists undertook this experiment many decades back to understand behavior in the face of adversity. They created a special dog cage with two independent metal bottoms. Each bottom was separately wired to provide a small electric shock to the dog in the cage. The shock was somewhat painful so that Dog could not ignore it.
Dog Cage Details
The wiring was done in such a way that the researcher could turn on or off one or both chambers at the same time.
Scientist turned on the shock mechanism in the bottom where the dog was sitting. As you would imagine the dog was startled and it ran away from that place until it found a place where there was no shock. Then the scientist turned off that chamber and turned on the other chamber. As expected the dog again ran away from that bottom to a place where it no longer felt the shock. Each time the scientist repeated this, the dog behaved predictably. It moved away to a place where there was no shock.
Then the researcher turned on both the chambers. At this point, the dog started running all over the place but couldn’t find a safe place to sit. After it continued to run for some time, it did something surprizing. It sat down in spite of the electric shock being live.
The poor creature just gave up and keep sitting there.
Surprising Finding
Then the scientist turned off the elector current in both chambers. When he turned on the electric current in the chamber where the dog was sitting, the dog no longer ran away. Although the other chamber had no shock the dog did not attempt to find it. It had learned to become helpless.
What is Learned Helplessness?
This mechanism of learned helplessness is associated with depression in individuals but you can also see this to be the case in organizations. Many organizations learn this behavior after failing to achieve their goals repeatedly. I discussed the case of New York police department in the late 1980s being in such a state of learned helplessness in my book the dark side of innovation.
Is There a Solution?
In such situations, people start believing that nothing they do will change the state of affairs.
Obviously, this is not true but the organization believes it and thus stops taking sufficient action. In such situations, a change in leadership is often required to change old patterns of beliefs in organizations.
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