Learned helplessness in the workplace

In Learned Optimism, Marty Seligman described a set of experiments about learned helplessness:

There is an area divided by a short barrier with a dog standing on one side.  The floor underneath is electrified but the dog is able to escape by jumping the barrier to the other side.  This was originally a behaviourist experiment about stimulus-response but while visiting, Seligman noticed that some dogs would stop attempting to jump to escape the electric shocks.  He surmised that the dogs had given up.  This was pooh-poohed by the behaviourists as nonsense.  Dogs can't give up.  Dogs are just stimulus-response machines they claimed.

So Seligman set up another experiment.  First scenario, electrify the floor, escape by jumping the barrier.  Second scenario, randomly electrify the floor independent of whether the barrier is jumped or not.  In the second scenario, dogs would start exhibiting the giving up behaviour even after the randomness was turned off.

Now the more interesting result is this:  If you dragged the dogs across the barrier to show them that the shocks were escapable, they would re-learn hope and would never give up again.  Reintroducing randomness would be seen as a temporary situation that if you held out, would go away.

I've noticed this kind of learned helplessness in various workplaces.  It's not that they don't know it hurts.  It's not that they don't have ideas of how to fix it.  But they've given up.  They don't believe it will make any difference because the system has taught them that nothing they do will change anything.

Sometimes, our job is to drag people across barriers to teach them hope again.