Learned Helplessness and Motivation: What It Means for Pupils Who Give Up

Every teacher knows the pupil who puts their head down before the task has started. “I can’t do it.” “What’s the point?” It can look like laziness or defiance. Often it is something else: a pupil who has learned, through repeated experience, that their effort makes no difference.

Psychologists have a name for this pattern, learned helplessness. The theory behind it has changed a good deal since the 1960s, and the newer version is more hopeful for teachers.

Where the idea came from

In 1967, Martin Seligman and Steven Maier published experiments with dogs at the University of Pennsylvania. Dogs were placed in one of three groups. One group received electric shocks they could stop by pressing a panel. A second group received exactly the same shocks, but nothing they did made a difference. A third group received no shocks.

Later, all the dogs were placed in a box where they could escape a shock by jumping over a low barrier. Most dogs from the first and third groups learned to escape quickly. Many dogs from the second group did not try. They lay down and endured the shock, even though escape was now easy.

The first two groups received the same amount of shock, so the amount could not explain the difference. Control could. Seligman and Maier concluded that the dogs had learned that their actions did not matter, and carried that expectation into a new situation.

These experiments raise serious ethical questions, and they are uncomfortable to read about. They were very influential all the same, and they shaped decades of research on depression and motivation.

From animals to people

Studies with people followed. Donald Hiroto and Seligman (1975) found that students exposed to noise they could not stop, or to problems that could not be solved, often did worse on later tasks that were solvable.

People are more complicated than the original theory allowed, though. Not everyone gave up after uncontrollable experiences, and those who did gave up to different degrees. In 1978, Lyn Abramson, Seligman and John Teasdale reformulated the theory around attributions: the explanations people give themselves for what happens. They suggested three dimensions matter:

• Internal or external: “It’s me” versus “It was the situation”.
• Stable or unstable: “It will always be like this” versus “That was a bad day”.
• Global or specific: “I’m bad at everything” versus “I found that test hard”.

A person who explains failure as internal, stable and global (“I’m stupid”) is more likely to stop trying across many areas. This links to Bernard Weiner’s broader attribution theory of motivation, which has been influential in education.

The 2016 revision

Fifty years after the first experiments, Maier and Seligman revisited the theory in a paper titled “Learned helplessness at fifty: insights from neuroscience”. Drawing on decades of brain research, mostly in animals, they turned the original idea around.

They argued that passivity is not learned. It is the default, unlearned response to prolonged bad events. What animals learn, when they can escape, is that they have control. A part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex detects control and then dampens activity in a brainstem area, the dorsal raphe nucleus, which drives the passive response. In short, giving up is the starting point, and the experience of control is what lets an animal override it.

The neuroscience comes from animal studies, and it would be a stretch to apply it directly to a Year 9 pupil. The reframing is still useful. If the default response to repeated failure is to stop trying, then a pupil who gives up is behaving in a very normal way. The question for teachers becomes: how do we give this pupil real experiences of control?

Attribution retraining

One of the earliest classroom applications came from Carol Dweck in 1975. She worked with children who had been identified as giving up after failure. One group received a programme of success-only tasks. The other group met occasional failures, and an adult explained those failures as a result of not enough effort.

After the training, the children in the success-only group still fell apart when they met failure. The children who had been taught to link failure to effort were more likely to keep going and maintain their performance. Success on its own was not enough. What changed things was how the children interpreted failure.

This later fed into Dweck’s work on mindset, which has its own debates; I have written about those in growth mindset: what the research does and doesn’t say.

A word of caution about effort

“Try harder” is not always the right message. For a pupil with dyslexia, a working memory difficulty or an unidentified learning need, more effort with the same approach may lead to more failure, which can deepen helplessness. Many researchers and practitioners now prefer to link outcomes to strategy as well as effort: “That method didn’t work. Let’s try a different one.” This keeps the explanation internal and changeable without blaming the child.

What helps in the classroom

The ideas above point to a few practical habits.

Make control visible

Pupils need to see a link between what they do and what happens. Small, clear tasks with quick feedback help, because the pupil can see their action led to a result. Breaking work into steps and ticking each one off can make progress visible to a pupil who believes nothing they do counts.

Plan for success that is earned

Easy work alone does not fix helplessness, as Dweck’s study suggests. The aim is tasks that are challenging but reachable with effort and support, so that success means something.

Talk about explanations

Listen to how pupils explain their results. “I’m rubbish at maths” is a global, stable explanation. You can gently offer a more specific and changeable one: “Fractions are tricky for you at the moment. Let’s look at where it went wrong.” In school, I find that pupils pick up the language adults use about them, so it is worth choosing it carefully.

Avoid accidental helplessness

Some school routines can teach helplessness without anyone intending it. A pupil who always receives the answer when they hesitate, or whose work is always finished by an adult, may learn that their own effort is not needed. This is a known risk with heavy one-to-one support, which is one reason guidance on making the best use of teaching assistants stresses building independence.

Notice the wider picture

A pupil who has given up at school may also be dealing with things they cannot control at home. Learned helplessness is a description of a pattern, not a diagnosis or a judgement. Be curious about what lies behind it.

For parents

If your child often says “I can’t” or “I’m stupid”, it can help to respond to the explanation and not only the feeling. When your child says “I’m stupid” has some practical ideas.

When to get help

Learned helplessness overlaps with low mood and depression, but it is not the same thing. If a child or young person seems persistently hopeless, has lost interest in things they used to enjoy, or talks about not wanting to be here, speak to the school’s SENCO or pastoral lead and to your GP, who can refer to NHS children and young people’s mental health services (often called CAMHS) where appropriate. If you think a child is at immediate risk, call 999.

Further reading

• Seligman, M. E. P. and Maier, S. F. (1967). Failure to escape traumatic shock. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74(1), 1-9.
• Hiroto, D. S. and Seligman, M. E. P. (1975). Generality of learned helplessness in man. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 31(2), 311-327.
• Abramson, L. Y., Seligman, M. E. P. and Teasdale, J. D. (1978). Learned helplessness in humans: critique and reformulation. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 87(1), 49-74.
• Dweck, C. S. (1975). The role of expectations and attributions in the alleviation of learned helplessness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 31(4), 674-685.
• Maier, S. F. and Seligman, M. E. P. (2016). Learned helplessness at fifty: insights from neuroscience. Psychological Review, 123(4), 349-367.

Cover image: Photo by Taylor Fry on Unsplash.