In May, 2002, Martin Seligman, the Director of the Positive Psychology Center, at the University of Pennsylvania, was giving a lecture at the San Diego Naval Base. It had been sponsored by the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, and some hundred listeners were in attendance. The topic of Seligman’s talk was simple: for a good part of his career, he had studied a concept that came to be known as learned helplessness, the passivity that often comes after we’ve faced problems that we can’t control. That afternoon, he wanted to describe how the data his team had collected over the years could help American personnel—military and civilian alike—“resist torture and evade successful interrogation by their captors,” he recalls. One audience member in particular seemed especially enthused. A year earlier, in December, 2001, he and a colleague had attended a small gathering at Seligman’s house, where 9/11 and anti-terrorism responses had been the topic of conversation. (The colleague had shared his appreciation of Seligman’s work—he was a psychologist himself and Seligman had been an inspiration.) Now, in San Diego, he was taking the opportunity to learn more about the possible direct applications of learned helplessness to the military. Seligman gave it no further thought. Learned helplessness had inspired a lot of people, and many of them, over the years, had expressed their appreciation.
In early December, 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee released its report on the torture techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency in questioning terror suspects since the 9/11 attacks. The report included hundreds of painfully graphic pages, and it revealed that, starting in 2002, many of the most brutal techniques were developed under the direction of two psychologists contracted by the Agency, James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Much of the torture was justified through experimental psychology.
“Neither psychologist had any experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qa’ida, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise,” the report stated. But all the same, they had created what they thought would be a winning approach, “theories of interrogation based on ‘learned helplessness,’ ” which, the report specified, was “the theory that detainees might become passive and depressed in response to adverse or uncontrollable events, and would thus cooperate and provide information.” One of the psychologists—the one who went by the pseudonym Grayson Swigert, who has been identified as Mitchell, “had reviewed research on ‘learned helplessness,’ ” and had “theorized that inducing such a state could encourage a detainee to cooperate and provide information.” He had also, months before he began to advise the C.I.A., attended Seligman’s post-9/11 gathering. He had been the one to come up to speak with the psychologist and to express his admiration.
To understand the nature of learned helplessness, one needs to travel back to Seligman’s early graduate-school days in the laboratory of Richard Solomon at the University of Pennsylvania. When Seligman began his studies, Solomon’s lab was working with dogs on a phenomenon that Ivan Pavlov had first identified as aversive conditioning or avoidance learning. The researchers administered shocks to the animals, accompanied by tones or lights, so that they would come to associate the tone or light stimuli with the shock’s onset, and, in some cases, then learn to avoid the shock by jumping over a barrier. Solomon would then work to see if he could get the dogs to, in effect, unlearn the association. When Seligman arrived at the lab, he noticed that some of the dogs had started to act rather strangely. Instead of trying to figure out how to avoid a new shock, they just sat there. They didn’t even try to figure it out. Teaming up with fellow graduate student Steven Maier, Seligman began to study what was going on.
In a series of experiments, Seligman and Maier first attached dogs to a harness, a kind of rubberized cloth hammock, with holes for the dogs’ legs to dangle free. As the dogs hung, their heads were kept in place by two panels, which they could easily press with their heads. At random intervals, coming between sixty and ninety seconds apart, they would receive a series of shocks to their hind feet. Some of the dogs could control the shocks with a simple press of the head against either of the panels; for others, the head-pressing did nothing. The moment the dogs with the functional panels touched either one, the shock ended. Otherwise, it lasted for thirty seconds to begin with, and for increasingly shorter durations thereafter.
The next day, each dog was set free inside a shuttle box, a two-compartment cage separated by an adjustable barrier. Each time the lights in the box went off, half of the floor would become electrified, shocking the poor animals. But if the dog jumped over the barrier and into the next cage, the shock could be avoided. This time, each dog had the power to end its discomfort quite easily.
When Seligman and Maier analyzed the results, they found a consistent pattern. The dogs that had learned to avoid the shocks by pressing their heads against the panels on the first day were quick to jump the barrier on day two. Not a single dog failed to learn to jump quickly after the first go-around. Those that had been unable to escape the shocks, though, weren’t even trying. They were free to move, explore, and escape—but they didn’t. Two-thirds of them were still hovering in the electrified side of the box by the end of the experiment—and for the remaining third, the average number of trials to learn to escape was just more than seven, out of the total ten. A week later, five of the six dogs that had failed to learn were still unwilling to even try: they once again failed the shuttle-box test. The effect of the harness experiment was been both severe and lasting.
Seligman and Maier called what they were observing “learned helplessness”—the same term that would resurface in Seligman’s lecture and in the Senate torture report. The phenomenon was reliably strong, reliably broad (that is, transferred from one situation to another), and reliably difficult to change once it set in. It was motivational (you no longer even try), emotional (you whimper and grow resigned), and cognitive (you generalize one experience to apply to a broader existence). And it wasn’t confined to dogs. Soon, others picked up on their work, demonstrating similar effects in cats, fish, rats, and the favorite of all experimental animals, college students.
But Seligman didn’t stop his research there. He had told his supervisor that he didn’t believe in causing suffering unless it had some inherent value that would lead to bettering lives, both canine and human. So he and Maier set out to figure out a way to reverse the effect of learned helplessness in the dogs. What they found was that one simple tweak could stop the passivity from developing. When the researchers first put all the dogs in the shuttle box, where the shock was controllable by a jump, and, only then, into the inescapable harness, the effect of the harness was broken: now, even though the dogs were being bombarded by shocks, they didn’t give up. They kept trying to control the situation, pressing the panels despite the lack of feedback. And when they were again put into the box, they didn’t cower. Instead, they immediately reclaimed their ability to avoid shocks.
That was what Seligman had been after. If dogs could be inured to learned helplessness, then, potentially, so could people.
So what had the dogs actually learned—and how could that lesson be translated to human beings? Seligman inferred that the canines that went on to escape shocks had realized something important—not all shocks are equal, and it doesn’t hurt to keep trying to get away. Those that didn’t likely went through a different reasoning process: Nothing I do here helps, so why even bother trying?
In 1978, working with his graduate student, Lyn Abramson, and John Teasdale, a psychologist at Oxford specializing in depression, Seligman began to apply the model to humans. Humans, the group posited, differed from other animals in one significant respect: when they find themselves helpless, they explicitly ask why that is the case. The answer, in turn, can differ along three different lines: whether the electric shock, so to speak, is seen as permanent or transient, pervasive or limited, and personal or incidental. Seligman called these differences our explanatory style. Some people were naturally inclined to believe that bad things will keep happening to us and that they are our fault. Some were naturally inclined toward the opposite—bad things are happening now, but they’ll stop and they’re not our fault. The former were those who were prone to depression; the latter were those who tended to bounce back. Seligman believed that humans, like dogs, could be taught to become more resilient, a phenomenon he called learned optimism.
For the next twenty years, Seligman worked with Aaron Beck, the psychiatrist who came up with the therapeutic approach of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or C.B.T., one of the most consistently successful methods of helping people overcome depression, to integrate his findings on learned helplessness into actual behavioral therapies. In 1984, he published a review of the evidence. First, he and his colleagues had found that the way people explained bad events to themselves really did link closely to depression risk. It was true in students, in people from low socioeconomic backgrounds, in children, and, predictably, in depressed patients. And, importantly, training people to change their explanatory habits—to more narrow, external, and transient—seemed to help them overcome existing depression and, in some cases, prevent its onset even when other risk factors were high.
In 1995, Seligman and his colleagues published the results of a longitudinal study of depression, or, rather, its prevention, in schoolchildren. He and his colleagues had recruited fifth- and sixth-graders from two school districts in a Philadelphia suburb, to participate in what they called a prevention program. Over the course of three months, children who either expressed symptoms of depression already or had tested at high risk for their development met for an hour and a half each week in groups of ten to twelve. At each meeting, a psychology graduate student took them through the steps of two types of therapy centered around explanatory style, one aimed at cognition— how they thought about things—and one at social problem-solving.
The cognitive program taught the kids to identify when they were having negative thoughts, to evaluate those thoughts objectively, and then to come up with alternatives. It also had them reframe any pessimistic explanations that they found themselves giving—my mom is sad, because I did something wrong—for more optimistic and realistic ones—my mom is sad, because she had a long day at work. Two weeks prior to the start of the program, one week after its end, and every six months after that, the researchers gave each child an array of tests to gauge her level of depression.
Not only were the children enrolled in the prevention program less depressed than those in the control group—it consisted of children from a neighboring district who were matched on all criteria and risk factors—but, over time, the difference grew more pronounced. After one year, twenty-nine per cent of the children in the control group reported mild to severe depression, compared to 7.4 per cent of those who had enrolled in the prevention program. At the end of the two years, forty-four per cent of the children in the control group had developed a form of depression. Only twenty-two per cent of the treatment group had done so. The improvements hinged largely on changes in the children’s explanatory style: the ones in the prevention group had learned how to create explanations that rendered them hopeful instead of hopeless.
Since then, the findings have been expanded to a major longitudinal project, the Penn Resiliency Program. The program to date has included more than seventeen controlled studies and has measured the approach in more than twenty-five hundred children and adolescents. Its current projects include an ongoing one in two Philadelphia school districts; a sister program in South Tyneside, Hertfordshire, and Manchester, in England; an offshoot in Australia’s Geelong Grammar School; and a program specifically targeted at early adolescent girls, the Girls in Transition Program. In 2009, a meta-analysis of the data found that students who had participated in versions of the cognitive-training program showed fewer depressive symptoms than non-participants in assessments performed six to eight months after and a year after the program’s conclusion.
This work, according to Seligman, who, in 1998, became president of the American Psychological Association, is his legacy. “I have spent my life trying to cure learned helplessness,” he told me.
But then came the torture report. And when he heard what his research had been used to justify, he was both shocked and mystified. He told me that he was “grieved that good science, which has helped many people overcome depression, may have been used for such a bad purpose as torture.” Not only that, but its very use, he felt, was contrary to the core of his findings. He is no scholar of interrogation, he says, but as he understands it, “the point of interrogation is to get at the truth and to have the person believe that telling the truth will lead to good treatment.” Does learned helplessness actually achieve that end?
Here’s what we know: learned helplessness can indeed be a severe form of torture. The inability to control one’s environment has repeatedly been shown to create not only anger and frustration but, eventually, deep and often insurmountable depression. In a sense, inducing learned helplessness makes a person give up. We shouldn’t forget the high price at which the learned-helplessness findings came: many of the animals used in the studies died or became severely ill shortly thereafter. So is learned helplessness an effective way of causing incredible pain? No doubt.
But here’s the more relevant question: Does the condition, in turn, make someone more likely to tell the truth and give up important information that had previously remained hidden? Here we have no direct data—after all, there have never been controlled torture trials that we know of—but we do have some theoretical basis in the study of severe depression to suggest that it will do no such thing. People who’ve given up lack all incentive. Once they are in that state of hopelessness, there is no longer a way to motivate them. Absent any possible inducement or motivation, most people just want to quit. The threat of pain or even death no longer makes much of a difference: Nothing I do or say matters, so why bother? A person in a state of learned helplessness is someone who is passive, someone who has abandoned all active will and desire. He can tell the truth, yes, but why? Lying or saying whatever it is that the torturer wants to hear is just as likely to attain the same result. A person without motivation is not a person who can be induced to tell deep truths: the incentive simply isn’t there.
“I think learned helplessness would make someone less defiant and more likely to compliantly tell the interrogator what he wants to hear,” Seligman said. “It would also likely undermine the belief that telling the truth will lead to good treatment.” In other words, it would do the opposite of what its users in this particular context intended.
Seligman says that he isn’t the father of learned helplessness. He’s the father of positive psychology: the study of how to go about identifying and nurturing positive emotion, and using it to withstand the negative. Learned helplessness, at the end, isn’t about helplessness at all—it’s about empowerment and control.
