![]() As the dogs hung, their heads were kept in place by two panels, which they could easily press with their heads. In a series of experiments, Seligman and Maier first attached dogs to a harness, a kind of rubberized cloth hammock, with holes for the dogs’ legs to dangle free. Teaming up with fellow graduate student Steven Maier, Seligman began to study what was going on. Instead of trying to figure out how to avoid a new shock, they just sat there. ![]() When Seligman arrived at the lab, he noticed that some of the dogs had started to act rather strangely. Solomon would then work to see if he could get the dogs to, in effect, unlearn the association. The researchers administered shocks to the animals, accompanied by tones or lights, so that they would come to associate the tone or light stimuli with the shock’s onset, and, in some cases, then learn to avoid the shock by jumping over a barrier. ![]() When Seligman began his studies, Solomon’s lab was working with dogs on a phenomenon that Ivan Pavlov had first identified as aversive conditioning or avoidance learning. To understand the nature of learned helplessness, one needs to travel back to Seligman’s early graduate-school days in the laboratory of Richard Solomon at the University of Pennsylvania. He had been the one to come up to speak with the psychologist and to express his admiration. But all the same, they had created what they thought would be a winning approach, “theories of interrogation based on ‘learned helplessness,’ ” which, the report specified, was “the theory that detainees might become passive and depressed in response to adverse or uncontrollable events, and would thus cooperate and provide information.” One of the psychologists-the one who went by the pseudonym Grayson Swigert, who has been identified as Mitchell, “had reviewed research on ‘learned helplessness,’ ” and had “theorized that inducing such a state could encourage a detainee to cooperate and provide information.” He had also, months before he began to advise the C.I.A., attended Seligman’s post-9/11 gathering. “Neither psychologist had any experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qa’ida, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise,” the report stated. Much of the torture was justified through experimental psychology. The report included hundreds of painfully graphic pages, and it revealed that, starting in 2002, many of the most brutal techniques were developed under the direction of two psychologists contracted by the Agency, James E. In early December, 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee released its report on the torture techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency in questioning terror suspects since the 9/11 attacks. Learned helplessness had inspired a lot of people, and many of them, over the years, had expressed their appreciation. (The colleague had shared his appreciation of Seligman’s work-he was a psychologist himself and Seligman had been an inspiration.) Now, in San Diego, he was taking the opportunity to learn more about the possible direct applications of learned helplessness to the military. A year earlier, in December, 2001, he and a colleague had attended a small gathering at Seligman’s house, where 9/11 and anti-terrorism responses had been the topic of conversation. ![]() One audience member in particular seemed especially enthused. That afternoon, he wanted to describe how the data his team had collected over the years could help American personnel-military and civilian alike-“resist torture and evade successful interrogation by their captors,” he recalls. The topic of Seligman’s talk was simple: for a good part of his career, he had studied a concept that came to be known as learned helplessness, the passivity that often comes after we’ve faced problems that we can’t control. It had been sponsored by the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, and some hundred listeners were in attendance. In May, 2002, Martin Seligman, the Director of the Positive Psychology Center, at the University of Pennsylvania, was giving a lecture at the San Diego Naval Base. The phenomenon of learned helplessness- the passivity that often comes after we’ve faced problems that we can’t control-was first studied in dogs. ![]()
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