Impaired performance by adult humans: Learned helplessness or wrong hypotheses?

Abstract

Seligman and his associates demonstrated that following a series of uncontrollable, stressful events dogs fail to respond on simple tasks. Seligman accounted for this with a learned-helplessness hypothesis, that uncontrollable events produce a subject who perceives that response is useless and whose motivation to respond is weakened. Recently, analogous experiments have been performed with adult human subjects. Impairment of problem solving has been demonstrated following failure on a prior task. The same learned-helplessness hypothesis has been invoked for this result. The present thesis is that these human experiments may be equally well interpreted by Hypothesis Theory. According to Hypothesis Theory, failure produces subsequent impairment in performance not because subjects are helpless but because they are misdirected about the nature of the solution. That is, these subjects are not passive. Rather, they test incorrect hypotheses. Experimental data are presented to suggest the validity of the Hypothesis Theory interpretation.