Discussion
The
results lend support the learned helplessness theory. Our participants
who performed the hard task (or impossible!) were subjected to learned
helplessness and in turn did significantly worse on the standardised
anagram task. A probable explanation for this may well be that the ways
people perceive failure.
There are 3 types of attribution
- Personal
Internal
- Due to factors inside oneself. Therefore any
failure or success will be blamed on oneself.
- Permanent
Stable
- Belief
that factors will remain the same therefore any failure will result in
the individual perceiving it to be constant (once a loser, forever a
loser).
Unstable
- Belief that factors change over time therefore failure is perceived as a temporary setback.
- Pervasive
Global
- One failure in a task will be linked to other failures; one sees failure as omnipresent in all aspects of one’s life
Specific
- The
individual perceives failure in one situation as isolated; will not
think that because they failed in this instance they will undoubtedly
fail in other (although unrelated tasks).
Obviously a person who adopts a set of attribution as follows; internal, stable, and global, will
give up trying soon after being discouraged by the ‘impossible’ word
search task, whereas those who adopt the exact opposite set of
attributions as above; external, unstable, and specific, will
shrug off whatever misgivings, doubts and hesitations induced by the
earlier task, and thus were able to concentrate wholly on the anagram
task (which is really the task that matters anyway!).
In
short, how helpless you feel, and what you choose to do about it
depends on what sort of attributions you use to interpret failures. The
more you perceive yourself as in control, the more optimistic, and
therefore the less vulnerable to the debilitating (and demoralising!)
effects of learned helplessness.
An experiment by Alloy & Abrahamson (1979) illustrates this theory succinctly.
94% of their non- depressed participants stated that they felt they had control over a situation (which in fact they hadn’t!) whilst only 50% of the depressed participants felt they had control.
Thus, the degree of control one perceives to have over situations do affect optimism and help buffer against the detrimental effects of pessimism caused by learned helplessness.
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