Learned helplessness

Overview

Learned helplessness is a state of mind in which repeated experiences of your actions having no effect on the outcome lead you to give up trying even in new situations. The psychologist Martin Seligman and his colleagues reported it in 1967 through experiments with dogs. Dogs that had received repeated electric shocks they couldn't escape were later seen not trying to get away even when escape became possible. This was explained as a state of having learned that "nothing I do makes a difference."

Question boxes and learned helplessness

There are patterns in which learned helplessness sets in while running a question box. You block unpleasant questions and similar ones keep arriving, you answer carefully and still get criticized, you promote your question box and the questions don't increase. When experiences of "nothing changes no matter what I do" pile up like this, some people give up on even trying to improve things.

It can happen to senders too. Their questions get ignored, or even when they get an answer, it's only a sloppy one. When this keeps happening, they may learn that "there's no point in sending questions" and stop asking questions altogether.

Breaking out of helplessness

One clue for breaking out of learned helplessness is "small experiences of success." Seligman later also put forward "learned optimism," the opposite of helplessness.

In the context of a question box, you can also look for small experiences of success by trying small changes and watching the results. Try changing your answering style a little, changing the promotional text for your question box, or changing the time of day you answer. Experiencing through a small experiment that "my actions changed the outcome" helps break the chain of helplessness.