At the end of the article I just wrote about on the erroneous perception of SUV safety, there’s an interesting paragraph:
In psychology, there is a concept called learned helplessness, which arose from a series of animal experiments in the nineteen-sixties at the University of Pennsylvania. Dogs were restrained by a harness, so that they couldn’t move, and then repeatedly subjected to a series of electrical shocks. Then the same dogs were shocked again, only this time they could easily escape by jumping over a low hurdle. But most of them didn’t; they just huddled in the corner, no longer believing that there was anything they could do to influence their own fate. Learned helplessness is now thought to play a role in such phenomena as depression and the failure of battered women to leave their husbands, but one could easily apply it more widely.
I often wonder why I feel depressed or lonely so often–after all, I’m kind of cute, have a good job, a great sense of humor, and am often a nice guy. I have a feeling that I was trained to hide in that corner rather than escape because at least in that corner, I’ve made a decision about my own fate.
