Learning to Fail

Abstract

The concept of learned helplessness was developed by Seligman (see Seligman & Maier, 1967, Chapter 5 of this volume) to describe the behaviour of animals in an inescapable unpleasant situation. Dweck takes the idea a step further and applies it to human experience suggesting that learned helplessness exists when failure is perceived as insurmountable. She suggests that when we have this perception we are likely to attribute our failure at a task to stable and uncontrollable factors like lack of ability. In this circumstance, the failure is often followed by a deterioration in performance. On the other hand, people who explain their failure in terms of modifiable and unstable factors, like the amount of effort they put in, or the difficulty of the particular task they failed on, will often show improved performance following the failure.