Learned help­less­ness is an acquired sense that you can no longer con­trol your environment—so you quit try­ing to.

The exper­i­ment I described to you exists, but is actu­ally a vari­a­tion of the orig­i­nal, sim­pler exper­i­ment. The clas­sic experiment—the one that bet­ter dis­tills the essence of learned helplessness—involves two groups of dogs, not three. Call them groups A and B. Both groups receive strong elec­tric shocks while strapped into a hammock.

Group A dogs can turn the shock off by push­ing a panel with their lit­tle dog­gie snouts. They can do this any­time after the shock begins.

Each dog in Group B is “yoked” to a dog in group A—meaning that when­ever the Group A dog is shocked, so is the cor­re­spond­ing Group B dog, and when­ever the Group A dog turns off its shock, the shock is also turned off for the cor­re­spond­ing Group B dog. This is an ele­gant way of (1) ensur­ing that the dogs in the two groups receive exactly the same num­ber of shocks and for the same dura­tion, at the same time as (2) putting Group B dogs in a sit­u­a­tion where they had no power to con­trol their envi­ron­ment. For Group B dogs, the shocks seems inescapable, even though the actual phys­i­cal pun­ish­ment meted out to the two groups is identical.

The crux of this exper­i­ment is learn­ing. The key ques­tion is, in a new sit­u­a­tion where the dogs can actu­ally help them­selves, will the dogs who were able to exer­cise con­trol over their cir­cum­stances learn dif­fer­ently com­pared to dogs who sim­ply had to endure the shocks?

To test this, dogs from both groups are put in a “shut­tle box,” and then pre­sented with a con­di­tioned stim­u­lus (e.g. a bell) 10 sec­onds before the floor becomes elec­tri­fied. The shut­tle box has a bar­rier the dog can jump over, and the other side is not elec­tri­fied. This is actu­ally a stan­dard avoid­ance learn­ing task. In this task, learn­ing can be quan­ti­fied by mea­sur­ing the num­ber of sec­onds it takes for the dog to jump, over a period of 10 or so tri­als. If the dog jumps within 10 sec­onds of hear­ing the bell, it avoids the shock alto­gether. If it fails to jump after 60 sec­onds of shock­ing, the elec­tric­ity is turned off. Let me empha­size: to avoid the shock, all the dog has to do is jump over the barrier.

For pur­poses of com­par­i­son, we look at dogs that have no exper­i­men­tal expe­ri­ence (Group C). As you would expect, fresh “naïve” dogs hear the bell, do noth­ing, get shocked, and within a few sec­onds, scram­ble over the hur­dle. After a cou­ple of tri­als, they learn to asso­ciate the bell with the shock (clas­si­cal con­di­tion­ing), and they jump well before their grace period is up, thus entirely avoid­ing the shock.

Group A dogs learn just about as quickly as naïve dogs to avoid the shock.

Here’s the inter­est­ing find­ing. Group B dogs, the ones who have expe­ri­enced inescapable shock in the ham­mock, react pas­sively. They do not look for an escape. “They lay down, whined qui­etly, and sim­ply took what­ever shocks were deliv­ered. They nei­ther avoided nor escaped; they just gave up trying.”

Why do the Group B dogs give up? Because they are con­di­tioned to feel help­less. In the first con­di­tion, they had no con­trol over the shocks they were getting—so they gave up try­ing, not just in that sit­u­a­tion, but in all sit­u­a­tions. Even when they’re placed in a new situation—one in which they actu­ally have con­trol over their fate—they don’t real­ize it because they don’t even look for an escape. Even after repeated tri­als, the Group B dogs never ever dis­cover that they can avoid the shock sim­ply by jump­ing over the hurdle.

Like the Group B dogs, many peo­ple who are depressed exhibit learned help­less­ness, says Mar­tin Selig­man, the Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia psy­chol­o­gist who led the exper­i­ments. Such peo­ple are pas­sive and fail to act or take ini­tia­tive because they feel like their acts are futile. Often, the per­son has been through an expe­ri­ence where she was objec­tively help­less in the face of per­sonal loss, pro­fes­sional fail­ure, or ill­ness. Now, the person’s depres­sion stems from a sense of hope­less­ness, a sense that she is a pas­sive vic­tim with no con­trol over life’s events, that her actions are futile—i.e. that she’s help­less. Other stud­ies have shown that learned help­less­ness impairs the immune sys­tem, and that “giv­ing up hope” has neg­a­tive health effects.

The good news is that learned help­less­ness can be unlearned: “We dragged those poor, reluc­tant ani­mals back and forth across the shut­tle­box over the bar­rier and back again, until they began to move under their own steam and came to see that their own actions worked. Once they did, the cure was one hun­dred per­cent reli­able and permanent.”

Last point: a dog (or pre­sum­ably, a per­son) can be “immu­nized” against learned help­less­ness. Dogs who learn early on that respond­ing mat­ters never acquire learned helplessness.