Learned Helplessness: Seligman's Shuttle Box to the CIA's KUBARK Manual

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In 1967 at the University of Pennsylvania, Martin Seligman and J. Bruce Overmier ran an experiment with three groups of dogs. One group was simply harnessed, a second received shocks it could stop with a lever, and a third, yoked to the second, received identical shocks with a lever that did nothing. Later placed in a shuttle box with a low partition, the first two groups hopped to safety, while most dogs in the third lay down and endured the shock. Threats, food and demonstrations failed; researchers had to physically move the dogs' legs over the barrier at least twice. Modern neuroscience reversed the theory: passivity is the brain's default state, and what is learned is control.

In humans, a noise experiment showed that a stop button participants never pressed restored their puzzle performance. Lyn Abramson, John Teasdale and Bernard Weiner developed the idea of explanatory style, in which permanent, personal and pervasive explanations are linked to depression, HPA axis stress and weaker immunity. The episode covers education, abusive relationships, Gregory Bateson's double bind theory of schizophrenia, and the CIA's 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual, then turns to recovery through disputing explanatory style and physical exercise.

• Chess players up to grandmaster level given unsolvable puzzles went on to fail simple ones.
• Ruby K. Payne theorized that repeated emergencies wiping out financial progress teach families that long-term planning is futile.
• Bateson's double bind example is a parent who demands affection, then criticizes the child as too clingy when it is offered.
• The KUBARK manual aimed for debility, dependency and dread, saying prolonged unpredictability produces defensive apathy.
• Benjamin N. Greenwood and Monika Fleshner found running wheels protected rats from helplessness, tied to serotonin in the dorsal raphe nucleus.