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Hillcrest Card Company 🔥🍉🇨🇺🏳️‍⚧️🇻🇪🔥@HillcrestCardCo · Sep 23, 2026

This person doesn't even understand what the phrase learned helplessness refers to. Learned helplessness is a…

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Summary

A thread explaining the psychological concept of learned helplessness, originating from experiments on dogs that were repeatedly shocked with no escape route, resulting in them giving up attempts to escape even when it became possible. The author emphasizes that learned helplessness describes a state of giving up after experiencing trauma or torture from which no action provided relief.

Summarized by ThreadOut AI from the full thread. May miss nuance — read the thread below.

  1. #1

    This person doesn't even understand what the phrase learned helplessness refers to. Learned helplessness is a phenomena in which a living being stops trying to escape a painful stimulus because past experiences with that stimulus taught them their actions do not matter. 🧵

    ♠️ACE🇵🇸@F4CELYSS · Sep 22, 2026

    Not to sound like a boomer but this generation is defined by learned helplessness. People use autism or ADHD as an excuse to wave away any accountability for themselves instead of adapting to being an adult

  2. #2

    Learned helplessness as a concept emerged from a study where they trapped young dogs in a box with a floor that electrocuted them. When the dogs were electrocuted, at first they might jump and try to get away, but they were trapped and kept getting electrocuted.

  3. #3

    Then the researchers changed the box so the dogs could jump over a little fence and get away from the electrified floor. But the dogs had learned nothing they did stopped the shocks, so they stopped trying to escape and just lay there getting electrocuted over and over again.

  4. #4

    Translating this to people, if you constantly torture or traumatized a person in a way that absolutely nothing they do stops the torture and trauma, eventually they often stop trying to escape. They stop fighting back against the thing that is torturing them.

  5. #5

    Let's be clear. The researchers were physically torturing these dogs. That's what learned helplessness refers to. When you torture an animal so much and you don't let them escape no matter how hard they try until they give up. You break their spirit. That's learned helplessness.

  6. #6

    When you say young people have learned helplessness you are saying those people have been tortured repeatedly in such a way that nothing they did stopped the pain. No matter what they did. So eventually they stopped fighting against being tortured. They gave up hope.