dog electrocution experiment

Learned Helplessness

Charlotte Nickerson

Research Assistant at Harvard University

Undergraduate at Harvard University

Charlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.

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Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

Learned helplessness is a psychological state in which an individual, after repeated exposure to uncontrollable negative events, believes they are powerless to change their situation, even when opportunities to do so arise. This leads to passivity, decreased motivation, and a sense of hopelessness, which can persist even when circumstances change and control is possible. Learned helplessness is often associated with depression.

Key Takeaways

• Learned Helplessness is a phenomenon that occurs when a series of negative outcomes or stressors cause someone to believe that the outcomes of life are out of one’s control.
• If a person learns that their behavior makes no difference to their aversive environment, they may stop trying to escape from aversive stimuli even when escape is possible.
• Martin Seligman and Steven F. Maier first identified learned helplessness as a phenomenon in the 1960s. These psychologists conducted experiments on dogs, finding that, when exposed to repeated shocks that they could not control, the animals refrained from taking action when they could prevent the shocks.
• Learned helplessness has notably been linked to and used as an explanation for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in humans, but not without criticism.
• There are a number of ways to overcome learned helplessness. One mentioned by Seligman himself is learned hopefulness.

What Is Learned Helplessness?

Learned Helplessness is a phenomenon where repeated exposure to uncontrollable stressors results in people failing to use any methods to control their response to those stressors that are at their disposal in the future.

Essentially, those experiencing learned helplessness are said to learn that they lack behavioral control over the events in their environment, which, in turn, undermines their motivation to make changes or attempt to alter situations.

The first people to describe learned helplessness were the American psychologists Steven F. Maier and Martin E. P. Seligman.

Martin Seligman conducted a series of classic experiments in the 1960s (Seligman & Maier, 1967). Some dogs were placed in a chamber where they received electric shocks from which they could not escape (the non-escape condition).

The dogs in the escape group could escape the shocks by pressing a panel with their nose.

In the second phase, the animals were placed in a shuttle box divided by a barrier in the middle so that the dogs could jump in order to escape the shocks. Only the dogs that had learned to escape in the previous phase tried to jump. The other dogs did not.

When the dogs in the “non-escape” condition were given the opportunity to escape the shocks by jumping across a partition, most failed even to try; they seemed just to give up and passively accept any shocks the experimenters chose to administer.

In comparison, dogs who were previously allowed to escape the shocks tended to jump the partition and escape the pain.

3 symptoms of learned helplessness

Martin Seligman, the psychologist who first described learned helplessness, identified three main features that characterize this behavior:

• Lack of motivation: When faced with new challenges or difficult situations, people with learned helplessness often fail to respond or even try. They feel like giving up before they start and have a low tolerance for even the smallest bumps in the road.
• Difficulty learning from success : Even when people with learned helplessness manage to cope with a situation successfully, they have trouble learning from that experience. They don’t see their success as a sign that they can handle similar challenges in the future.
• Emotional numbness : People with learned helplessness may seem less affected by painful or stressful events. They might appear to be emotionally flat or unresponsive.

However, later research found that even though people with learned helplessness might seem emotionally numb on the outside, they are actually experiencing high levels of stress on the inside.

Scientists discovered this by measuring cortisol levels, a stress hormone, in their blood (Ackerman, 2022).

Is learned helplessness a mental health condition? 

Learned helplessness is not a diagnosable mental health condition but a thought disorder characterized by problematic thinking patterns that lead to maladaptive behavior.

Although not a standalone disorder, learned helplessness can feature in or exacerbate other mental health conditions such as anxiety, depression, phobias, and loneliness.

Symptoms of learned helplessness, including low motivation, perceived lack of control, and low self-esteem, overlap with those of depression and anxiety.

In the 1970s, Seligman extended the concept of learned helplessness from nonhuman animal research to clinical depression in humans and proposed a learned helplessness theory to explain how people become vulnerable to depression.

According to this theory, people who are repeatedly exposed to stressful situations beyond their control develop an inability to make decisions or engage effectively in purposeful behavior.

Subsequently, researchers have noticed that this learned helplessness theory is similar to posttraumatic stress disorder (Ackerman, 2022).

The Role of Explanatory Styles in Learned Helplessness

Although the initial learned helplessness theory was considered an important breakthrough in its time, it soon became accepted that the theory needed further development to apply to humans, who are more complex than other animals in terms of their cognitive processes.

Seligman and colleagues later reformulated the original learned helplessness model of depression (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978).

In their reformulation, they emphasized attributions (i.e., a mental explanation for why something occurred) that lead to the perception that one lacks control over negative outcomes and are important in fostering a sense of learned helplessness.

The explanatory style model of learned helplessness seeks to identify patterns in individual reactions to positive and negative events and occurrences in their lives.

The model’s logic is that when individuals find themselves in a situation where something has gone either right or wrong, they will ask why.

The answers that that person tends to give when asking themselves that kind of question will dictate whether that person defaults to an optimistic or pessimistic explanatory style (Healy, 2017).

Unhelpful : When a negative event occurs, if someone believes that the cause of the event is stable or long-lasting, this perspective can lead to chronic feelings of helplessness.

Helpful : When a negative event occurs, if someone believes that the cause is temporary, this perspective can reduce feelings of helplessness.

Unhelpful : If a person believes that the cause of a negative event will impact multiple areas of their life, they may be more susceptible to experiencing widespread helplessness.

Helpful : If a person believes that the cause of a negative event is specific to the issue at hand and will not affect other areas of their life, they will be less likely to experience helplessness.

Unhelpfu l: If someone attributes the cause of a negative event to their own actions or characteristics (an internal cause) rather than external factors, it can have negative consequences for their self-esteem.

In their writing on explanatory styles, Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson (1967) stressed that one’s explanatory style will tend to follow a pattern. That means that someone will tend to respond to positive and negative events in consistent, habitual ways.

This can be very advantageous to someone’s well-being if they happen to default to an optimistic explanatory style, but very problematic for those who tend toward pessimism.

In fact, learned helplessness and a pessimistic explanatory style are each linked with the development of depression in individuals (Healy, 2017).

Optimistic vs. Pessimistic Explanatory Styles

The markers of an optimistic explanatory style stand in direct contrast to those signaling their pessimistic counterpart.

• For example, while the pessimistic style can view negative circumstances as something that will inevitably persist and positive occurrences as temporary, the optimistic style tends to view negative circumstances as temporary and expects positive occurrences to persist.
• Additionally, while the negative explanatory style tends toward self-blame for outcomes that go awry and credit external factors when things go right, the positive style leads to individuals crediting themselves when things go right and identifying external factors as key when things go wrong (Healy, 2017).

Nonetheless, moderation is required in considering the extent to which an optimistic explanatory style is the most beneficial for overcoming learned helplessness.

For example, always defaulting to blaming others or circumstances when things go wrong and always attributing successes as exclusively one’s doing can, while meeting the criteria for the optimistic explanatory style, constitute a problem in itself (Healy, 2017).

Overcoming Learned Helplessness

Ultimately, Learned helplessness provides an explanation for human behaviors that may otherwise seem odd or counterproductive, and understanding learned helplessness provides pathways to removing or reducing its negative impacts (Ackerman, 2022).

Focus on what you can control

Focusing on what you can control is a powerful way to combat learned helplessness. When you feel like everything is out of your control, it’s easy to give up and feel helpless.

But by shifting your focus to the things you can influence, you can start to regain a sense of power over your life.

For example, you might not be able to control whether or not you get a promotion at work, but you can control how much effort you put into your job.

You can’t control the weather, but you can control how you prepare for and respond to it.

Here are some things you can control:

• Your attitude : Choose to approach challenges with a positive, can-do mindset.
• Your effort : Decide how much time and energy you put into your goals.
• Your response : You can’t always control what happens to you, but you can control how you react to it.
• Your self-care : Prioritize taking care of your physical and mental health.
• Your relationships : Nurture the relationships that bring positivity into your life.

By focusing on these areas, you remind yourself that you have the power to influence your life, even in small ways.

This can help combat the feeling of helplessness and give you the confidence to tackle bigger challenges over time.

Learned optimism

Learned optimism, a concept introduced by Martin Seligman, is the antithesis of learned helplessness.

While learned helplessness involves internalizing a sense of hopelessness about one’s circumstances, learned optimism encourages individuals to challenge their negative thought processes and adopt a more positive outlook.

By doing so, people can change their behaviors and ultimately, their outcomes.

The process of developing learned optimism involves recognizing and questioning the automatic negative thoughts that contribute to feelings of helplessness.

When faced with a challenge or setback, individuals with learned optimism actively reframe their thoughts, looking for alternative explanations and solutions rather than defaulting to self-blame or despair.

For example, instead of thinking, “I failed because I’m not good enough,” a person practicing learned optimism might think, “This was a tough situation, but I can learn from it and do better next time.”

By consistently challenging negative self-talk and focusing on the aspects of a situation they can control, individuals can gradually shift their mindset from one of helplessness to one of resilience and empowerment.

Cultivating learned optimism takes time and practice, but it can have a profound impact on an individual’s well-being, motivation, and ability to overcome challenges.

By adopting a more optimistic outlook, people can break free from the cycle of learned helplessness and take active steps toward creating positive change in their lives.

Learn from failures

Carol Dweck, a psychologist, has found another powerful way to reduce learned helplessness, and it involves experiencing failure. In her research, Dweck divided people into two groups:

• The first group was given tasks that were designed for them to fail. After failing, they were told to take responsibility for their failure and to believe that it happened because they didn’t put in enough effort.
• The second group was given tasks that were easy enough for them to succeed every time. They never experienced failure during the study.

The results of Dweck’s (1975) study were interesting. The group that only experienced success showed no changes in how they reacted to failure later on. They still had extreme, negative reactions when they failed at something.

However, the group that experienced failure and was taught to take responsibility for it showed big improvements. They didn’t react as badly when they failed at something later on.

In simple terms, this study suggests that experiencing failure and learning to see it as a result of not trying hard enough, rather than a lack of ability, can help people overcome learned helplessness.

It teaches them that failure isn’t permanent and that they have the power to change the outcome next time by putting in more effort.

Learned hopefulness

Learned hopefulness is a concept that emphasizes the importance of empowering experiences in helping individuals overcome learned helplessness.

It suggests that by providing opportunities for people to learn new skills and develop a sense of control over their lives, they can become more resilient in the face of everyday challenges and barriers.

Unlike learned optimism, which focuses on changing thought patterns, learned hopefulness emphasizes the role of actual experiences in shaping one’s outlook and ability to cope with difficulties.

When individuals are exposed to situations that allow them to successfully navigate challenges, they develop a sense of mastery and control. This, in turn, helps them approach future obstacles with greater confidence and determination.

By fostering learned hopefulness through supportive environments and skill-building opportunities, individuals can break free from the cycle of learned helplessness and develop a more empowered, proactive approach to life.

This resilience can serve as a buffer against the negative effects of stress and adversity.

Overparenting and learned helplessness

Overparenting, often associated with “helicopter parents,” can inadvertently contribute to developing learned helplessness in adulthood.

When parents consistently intervene and solve their children’s problems, children may become overly dependent on their parents’ support.

This dependency can lead to a fear of failure and a belief that they are incapable of succeeding without their parent’s help.

While it can be difficult for parents to watch their children struggle, experiencing routine failures and challenges is essential to growing up.

These experiences teach children valuable skills such as problem-solving, coping with disappointment, and building resilience.

By facing and overcoming obstacles on their own, children develop a sense of self-efficacy and learn that they can navigate difficult situations.

While well-intentioned, overparenting can deprive children of these crucial learning opportunities, potentially leading to learned helplessness and a lack of confidence in their own abilities as adults.

Learned helplessness in education

Learned helplessness is a common subject of interest in the field of education. In particular, educators are interested in how early academic failure or low academic self-esteem can impact later success and how the relationship can be influenced to enhance chances of success (Firmin, Hwang, Copella, & Clark, 2004).

Learned helplessness in students creates a cycle where those who feel they are unable to succeed are unlikely to put effort into schoolwork. This, in turn, decreases their chances of success, leading to even less motivation and effort.

This cycle can culminate in a student having almost no motivation to learn a subject and no competence.

It can even lead to a more generalized sense of helplessness in which the student has no belief in their ability and no motivation to learn any subject at school (Firmin, Hwang, Copella, & Clark, 2004).

Educators have developed a few strategies that can help prevent students from learning to be habitually helpless, such as:

Providing praise and encouragement based on the student’s abilities to help them believe they are good at these subjects.

Providing praise and encouragement based on a student’s efforts.

Working on individual goal-setting with students to help them learn that goals can be achieved and that outcomes can be in their control (Firmin, Hwang, Copella, & Clark, 2004).

Learned helplessness in relationships

Learned helplessness is also of interest to researchers focused on domestic violence, as it’s often observed in relationships involving abuse.

The phenomenon of learned helplessness has helped researchers answer questions such as why those who are abused do not tell others, try to get help or leave the relationships (Ackerman, 2022).

Often, in abusive relationships, abusers subject their victims to repeated abuse to acclimatize the victims to the abuse and teach them that they do not have control over the situation.

The abusers, as a result, maintain complete control, and the victims learn that they are helpless about their circumstances (Ackerman, 2022). Often, these perceptions are very difficult to get rid of, often requiring intensive therapy and support (Ackerman, 2022).

Studies of learned helplessness in humans

Although experiments that are as extreme as Seligman’s have not been performed on humans — and would not pass ethically — experiments performed on humans have produced similar outcomes.

In one study of learned helplessness in humans, participants were split into three groups. One group was subjected to a loud and unpleasant noise but was able to end the noise by pressing a button four times, while the second group was subjected to the same noise, but the button was not functional.

Everyone was then given a box with a lever which, when manipulated, would turn off the sound. As in the animal experiments, those who had no control over the noise in the first part tended not even to try to turn the noise off, while the other participants did (Seligman, 1967; Ackerman, 2022).

Learned hopefulness at volunteer organizations

One example of an environment where individuals can learn hopefulness is voluntary organizations. Someone working at an after-school center, tutoring young children in mathematics and Seligman’s may be encouraged to see how their presence leads to students directly developing a better grasp of school material.

This may have run-off effects in other areas of the participant’s life. Zimmerman (1990) conducted a study of how empowered individuals felt after volunteering consistently in such environments, as measured by cognitive, personality, and motivational measures of perceived control.

He found that those who volunteered felt more in control of their own lives and were more likely to attribute their successes to their own actions (Zimmerman, 1990).

Criticisms of Learned Helplessness

Seligman’s original (1967) learned helplessness theory, as well as the reformulations of others, have received a number of criticisms.

Psychologists believe that there is more to depression than learned helplessness. While the symptoms of learned helplessness may mirror those of depression, there is an array of complex neurological and psychological factors underlying the condition.

Indeed, depression may not necessarily arise from a repeat failure.

For example, students may become depressed after repeatedly blaming themselves for chronic school stress and poor exam results.

Additionally, those in learned helplessness experiments have often described their task as skill tasks despite acting as if they were chance tasks.

That is to say, people participating in these learned helplessness experiments, while seemingly behaving as if they have no control over the outcome, have been known to say verbally that they still believe that their effort can influence its outcomes (Ackerman, 2022).

Abramson, L. Y., Seligman, M. E., & Teasdale, J. D. (1978). Learned helplessness in humans: critique and reformulation .  Journal of abnormal psychology ,  87 (1), 49.

Ackerman, C. (2022). Learned helplessness: Seligman’s Theory of Depression .

Dweck, C. S. (1975). The role of expectations and attributions in the alleviation of learned helplessness. Journal of personality and social psychology, 31 (4), 674.

Firmin, M. W., Hwang, C. E., Copella, M., & Clark, S. (2004). Learned helplessness: The effect of failure on test-taking. Education, 124 (4), 688.

Healy, C. (2017). Learned Helplessness & Explanatory Style .

Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. (2016). Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience . Psychological Review, 123 (4), 349.

Seligman, M. E., & Maier, S. F. (1967). Failure to escape traumatic shock. Journal of experimental psychology, 74 (1), 1.

Seligman, M. E. (1972). Learned helplessness .  Annual review of medicine ,  23 (1), 407-412.

Thompson, J. A. (2010). Learned helplessness: You’re not trapped .

Zimmerman, M. A. (1990). Toward a theory of learned hopefulness: A structural model analysis of participation and empowerment. Journal of research in personality, 24 (1), 71-86.

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The learned helplessness experiment: Tragic science that keeps us from reaching our greatest potential

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• The concept of learned helplessness says that when we feel like a situation is out of our control, we eventually accept that we cannot change it and essentially give up.
• This was first observed in a study involving dogs, in which the dogs learned to expect an electric shock—the dogs stopped trying to escape the shock and simply accepted it.
• That said, learned helplessness is often observed in humans as well: take, for example, a kid who studies intensely for a class that he continues to fail—eventually he concludes that nothing he does will help and accepts this fate.
• Learned helplessness can have detrimental effects on our mental health: it can create or add to feelings of anxiety and depression and ultimately prevent us from reaching our optimal potential.
• If you think you are in a dangerous situation where you’ve experienced learn helplessness it’s important you see mental health help as soon as possible.

What Is Learned Helplessness? How Was It Discovered?

Learned helplessness is exactly as it sounds: this psychological theory asserts that when we feel like we have no control—or, when we feel helpless—we simply give up. This occurs when we’re continually exposed to a harsh environment or situation that we fail to escape. After a while, we stop trying to escape, even when a new opportunity presents itself.

This concept of learned helplessness was stumbled upon by psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven F. Maier, who were observing behavior in dogs conditioned to expect an electric shock. In a later phase of the study, each dog was placed in a crate that was divided down the middle by a low fence, which the dogs could easily jump over. The floor on just one side of the fence was electrified. Instead of jumping the fence, the dogs laid down. Why? They learned earlier that there was nothing they could do to avoid the shocks, so they gave up. This condition, known as learned helplessness, is where a human (or animal) stays in a negative situation because the past has taught them that they can’t improve their situation.

What Are Its Implications?

While learned helplessness was first observed in dogs during Seligman’s and Maier’s renowned experiment, this concept is observed in humans as well. Here are a couple examples of what learned helplessness can look like in humans and how it can have a profound influence on our lives:

• Johnny has been struggling in his biology class all year. He’s failed all of his tests and quizzes, even after studying the material for weeks. He decides to give tutoring a shot, but doesn’t succeed in making any improvements. Soon enough, he concludes that there’s nothing he can do to improve his performance—he feels helpless. Later, he’s required to take another bio class and experiences that same feeling of helplessness right off the bat.
• Jasmine and Colton have been dating for two years now. Their relationship developed slowly, but they eventually reached a place of deep love and trust. Just recently, however, Colton has been physically and mentally abusive. He pushes Jasmine around, calls her names, and gets mad at her for everything. Worst of all, he’s made her believe she deserves it. Jasmine wholeheartedly believes that she’s the one in the wrong. While she used to fight back, she eventually accepted that nothing she did would help her out of the situation. She feels helpless and powerless.

How Can Learned Helplessness Affect Our Mental Health?

As you can see above, learned helplessness can have some pretty serious effects on our lives—effects that, of course, relate back to our mental health. In Jasmine’s case, she’s accepted an abusive environment, which will have a profound impact on her overall wellbeing: her mental as well as emotional and physical state. In other cases, learned helplessness often contributes to increased anxiety and depression . This is especially dangerous for these individuals, as they may more easily accept their symptoms as unavoidable and untreatable. And finally, it can prevent us from excelling—from reaching our greatest potential.

If you are in a situation, in which you’re experiencing learned helplessness, it’s important that you seek help as soon as possible. A mental health professional, such as those at Thriveworks Waltham or another Thriveworks location , can assist you in reducing the symptoms of learned helplessness and overcoming the thinking patterns that contribute to it.

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Taylor Bennett is the Head of Content at Thriveworks. She received her BA in multimedia journalism with minors in professional writing and leadership from Virginia Tech. She is a co-author of “Leaving Depression Behind: An Interactive, Choose Your Path Book.”

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Old problem, new tools

One of the psychologists who discovered learned helplessness returns to the topic to pinpoint the phenomenon's neurobiological underpinnings.

By Sadie F. Dingfelder

Monitor Staff

October 2009, Vol 40, No. 9

Print version: page 40

In the 1960s, two University of Pennsylvania psychology graduate students discovered that when dogs received electrical shocks that they could not control, they later showed signs of anxiety and depression, but when dogs could end the shocks by pressing a lever, they didn't. What's more, the dogs that received the uncontrollable shocks in the first experiment didn't even try to escape shocks in a later experiment, even though all they needed to do was jump a low barrier.

The two researchers—Martin E.P. Seligman, PhD, and Steven F. Maier, PhD—termed their discovery "learned helplessness," and their findings are now a staple of introductory psychology textbooks. Seligman went on to further explore the finding, while Maier went in a different direction, retraining as a neuroscientist and studying the effects of stress on the immune system.

But 30 years after the experiment, Maier found himself thinking about that work and wondering if he could find a neural circuit for learned helplessness. With help from students and colleagues at the University of Colorado, where he's a psychology and neuroscience professor, Maier succeeded—and his findings suggest that the dogs from that early experiment were not, in fact, learning helplessness. They were failing to learn control.

"The default position of the brain is to assume that stress is not controllable," he said.

Ancient structures respond

To begin their search for the brain basis of learned helplessness, Maier and his colleagues had to identify a part of the brain that facilitates activation in the amygdala, which plays a major role in fear and anxiety responses, but that inhibits activation in the dorsal periaqueductal gray matter, which triggers fight or flight responses. A review of the literature turned up the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) as a likely candidate, since that cluster of neurons in the brain stem releases serotonin into the forebrain and limbic systems as well as the neighboring periaqueductal gray.

To explore the DRN's role in learned helplessness, Maier and his colleagues ran an experiment where they exposed rats to either controllable or uncontrollable tail shocks. The researchers measured the adult rats' DRN serotonin levels throughout the experiment and found that all of the animals' levels spiked when they were first exposed to the shock. But as soon as the rats learned to control the shock by pressing the levers, their serotonin levels dropped.

After the procedure, the researchers placed an unfamiliar juvenile rat in the cage of the rats that had been through the uncontrollable or controllable shock procedures. Usually, adult rats will sniff a juvenile rat, and that's what the animals that experienced controllable shock did, but the rats that had been through the uncontrollable shock procedure cowered in their cages and did not explore the newcomer. Their DRN activation also spiked and stayed high throughout the social stress test, while the other rats' DRNs stayed calm.

"It was the release of serotonin that was responsible for these behavioral effects," concluded Maier.

The mystery, however, was not solved. Past research shows the DRN, which resides in the ancient brain stem, is not smart enough to know whether stress is controllable or not—it just responds to stress in general. Some other part of the brain, said Maier, must be giving the DRN its instructions.

'Cool it, brain stem'

That area, according to research by Maier and his colleagues, appears to be the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPC), a part of the mammalian brain's frontal lobe. In a series of studies published last year, Maier and his colleagues found that when they deactivated the vMPC while animals received controllable shocks, the DRN stayed active, and the rats later showed the signs of anxiety and depression you'd expect only if they had not been in control of the situation. Also, when the researchers activated the vMPC in rats receiving uncontrollable shocks, DRN activation dropped off, and the animals did not show later effects of learned helplessness.

"This is the illusion of control at the level of neurochemistry," Maier said.

Taken together, the findings suggest that in the face of any stressor, the DRN activates the body's ancient stress responses, but if that stressor turns out to be controllable, the vMPC steps in and calms the DRN's response. "It's like the forebrain is saying, 'Cool it, brain stem, we have the situation under control,'" Maier said.

Looking back on his early research, Maier now realizes that the dogs in his seminal study were not learning helplessness, they were just staying in their natural state. Only with training and input from the vMPC, which evolved later than the DRN, do animals learn to relax when a situation is under control.

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Seligman’s Wailing Dogs: Psychology of Learned Helplessness

When bad things happen, we do everything we can to make them better. But, if all our efforts fall flat, it can create a constant high level of stress.

This chronic state of stress may trigger us to “learn” that there is no way to stop or reduce the unending suffering, leading us to feel deeply “helpless.”

It is when people go into “conditioned defeat” and believe they have no control over what happens. So they should simply give up and accept whatever happens thereafter.

• The principle so learned helplessness theory has been used to extract information from captured “terrorists” by the US army.
• Often, a state of learned helplessness is engineered by cruel narcissists and psychopaths to make their victims suffer without trying to escape.

What is Learned Helplessness?

Learned helplessness is a state of mental powerlessness triggered by failures to control an unpleasant life event. It occurs when one is repeatedly exposed to a negative stimulus or painful situation from which they fail to extract themselves despite many attempts. It is a reinforced sense of helplessness.

It is the core concept around which psychologists have built many theories and principles. Its impact extends well beyond the sphere of science, and common people are aware of it today.

Learned helplessness is a psychological condition whereby individuals learn that they have no control over unpleasant or harmful conditions, that their actions are futile, and that they are helpless. — Hall & Goodwin, 2008

Learned helplessness is a mental state of defeat in which the willpower is conditioned to surrender before external forces.

Learned Helplessness Dog Experiment

What’s the experiment where the dog receives electric shocks?

Martin Seligman conducted studies in which dogs were placed on a floor that administered electric shocks with no way of escaping. When the dogs were eventually given the opportunity to escape, they just lay there wailing.

In a series of experiments around 1967, Seligman showed that when a dog is repeatedly shocked while disallowed from fleeing, it gives up trying to escape later on, even when an escape route is open .

His research was published as Learned helplessness: Theory and evidence , Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. (1976) in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Seligman and his team built a partitioned box with a “shocking” floor on one side and a normal floor on the other.

At first, they kept the partition low. When a dog was inside the “shocking” side, whenever an electric shock came through the floor, it jumped the low partition to the safer side.

Next, the experimenters raised the partition to close up the chambers. This time, the dogs could not flee after receiving electric shocks. They made frantic attempts to find a way out whenever a shock came through, but they couldn’t.

Finally, they lay down, whimpering every time they felt a shock, without even trying to get up. They marked these dogs as having learned “helplessness.”

In the next experiment, when these “helpless” dogs were put inside the low-height partition box and subjected to electric shocks, they simply lay there. The partition was low this time, and the dogs could have leaped over. But since Seligman had conditioned them to be “helpless,” they merely lay there, enduring the shocks while whimpering helplessly.

These whimpering dogs’ brains tell them that no matter what they do, they cannot stop the shocks. So, believing they have no control over the situation, they remain in their box crying helplessly.

Is There Evidence of Learned Helplessness in Horses?

Learned Helplessness Psychology In Humans

Researchers have observed and studied learned helplessness in humans. It may result when a person feels powerless to change their circumstances, even when they have the ability to do so. It may present as a maladaptive behavioral response to difficulties, like avoidance of problems, loss of problem-solving skills, and negative affect.

• Chronic stress can suspend one’s ability to handle stress and lead to hopeless thoughts.
• When the person sees they cannot escape the stressful situation, their hopelessness intensifies.
• This state of pessimism and powerlessness makes them conclude that they have to keep suffering until their last breath.
• They finally resign to their fate, forced to accept that they can never change the situation no matter what they do.
• In a way that is somewhat similar to Stockholm syndrome , they give up trying to escape the situation, even when there might be a chance to escape .
• They tell themselves that they have become too feeble to make any effort to get away from the painful situation. So, they try to conserve their energy while tolerating the pain.
• Crying in pain appears to ease the full brunt of the pain.

Learned helplessness is a surrender response. It is the conviction that nothing you do can ever improve your situation. It makes you say, “There’s no way out, so let me just give up.”

Repeated failures despite one’s best efforts may take away the controllability of a struggling person. They start to feel their efforts are useless and stop trying, which can lead to a self-defeating cycle of negative thinking and behavior.

Helplessness, caused by seemingly uncontrollable negative experiences, can drastically reduce motivation and initiative, as well as create symptoms of anxiety and depression.

It can seriously affect one’s quality of life, causing issues in relationships, at work, and in personal motivation and success .

Learned helplessness can even change the physical structure of the brain (Hammack & Cooper, 2012).

Learned Helplessness Causes: How do we learn to be helpless?

Hammack et al. (2012) found that increased serotonin activity in the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) of the brain plays a critical role in learned helplessness.

Serotonin is a brain chemical that produces a sense of reward or even pleasure; it is released in response to an agreeable action.

Other hypotheses suggest a more extensive chemical basis for what causes humans to learn helplessness:

• a decrease in norepinephrine (arousal system),
• a decrease in GABA (a neurotransmitter),
• a fall in serotonin and dopamine (feel-good neurotransmitters),
• a boosting of the hormone cortisol (commonly known as the stress hormone ).

Helplessness has been linked to a number of mental illnesses like depression, anxiety, phobias, shyness, and loneliness.

Several researchers believe the way people interpret the causes of behavior and events and explain a certain event in a positive or negative way, determines whether they will develop learned helplessness.

Whether people develop learned helplessness is affected by a particular way of explaining, known as the pessimistic explanatory style . People with this style have a greater likelihood of learning helplessness.

An increase in amygdala activation (intense emotion) has also been suggested.

Examples of learned helplessness

1. learned helplessness in academic environment.

A student who has struggled with a particular subject for a long time and has failed to improve despite effort and support from teachers and parents may learn helplessness.

The student may begin to feel that they are incapable of improving in that subject and stop trying, which can lead to poor grades and a lack of confidence.

2. Learned helplessness in Relationships

In an abusive relationship, the victim may become trapped in a cycle of abuse and feel helpless to change the situation.

Over time, the victim may lose their sense of agency and begin to believe that they cannot escape or change their circumstances, even when presented with opportunities to do so.

3. Learned helplessness at the Workplace

An employee who has repeatedly suggested changes or improvements to their supervisor or manager but is consistently ignored may begin to feel powerless to effect change in their workplace.

They may stop offering suggestions or giving feedback, feeling that it will not make a difference, and become disengaged and demotivated in their work.

Here’s another example of learned helplessness from the work environment:

Think of psychological torture from a toxic boss. He not only torments you but also does not let you leave on the pretext of legal obligations.

His non-stop torment breaks your will to try to leave the factory since you realize nothing you do will ever stop your boss. Even if you leave, you think, they may call the cops and have you dragged back.

All this makes you reach a state of helplessness.

In such a state, even when your boss stops coming to the office , you do not try to leave your job or do less out of fear of being discovered and tortured more.

What are the symptoms of learned helplessness?

Learned helplessness can manifest in a variety of ways, but some common symptoms include:

1. Giving up easily

It may stop people from trying to achieve their goals because they feel that their efforts will not make a difference. This can lead to a loss of motivation and create a sense of resignation.

2. Low self-esteem

It can create feelings of inadequacy and a negative view of the self. People may feel “their best days are behind them,” they are powerless to improve their status, and cannot ever succeed.

3. Anxiety and depression

It can lead to feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, and despair, which can contribute to anxiety and depression.

4. Lack of initiative

Those with learned helplessness may feel that they have no control over their lives and may become passive, lacking initiative and avoiding new challenges.

5. Emotional detachment

These people may become emotionally detached from situations, leading to a lack of interest in activities ( anhedonia ). They also lose interest in others, even in their close relationships.

Learned helplessness and Depression

Seligman’s learned helplessness dog experiment led him to suggest that this phenomenon is similar to reactive depression in humans and can lead to other related mental illnesses.

In his seminal paper (Learned Helplessness) , Seligman said that both learned helplessness and reactive depression are caused by the expectation that one’s efforts will have no effect on the responses and outcomes.

Seligman asserted that the learned helplessness phenomenon appeared to be very much like human depression. Specifically, the motivational, cognitive, and emotional deficits that appeared in helpless dogs seemed to mimic the symptoms of reactive depression, in which a human gets depressed after a major life stressor. — Isaacowitz & Seligman, Encyclopedia of Stress (Second Edition), 2007.

Seligman’s original learned helplessness model of depression had several flaws.

• First, just as not every dog became helpless after uncontrollable shocks, not every person becomes depressed after stressful events with uncontrollable outcomes.
• Second, it could not differentiate between a depressed person’s belief that they could not personally influence outcomes and the belief that response-outcome independence was universal.

Abramson, Seligman, and Teasdale offered a revised model in 1978. This was based on the idea that, when a stressful event occurs, people do not just notice the future outcomes. They also ask themselves why the event occurred.

People have typical ways of answering this, and this is called their explanatory style .

What is an Explanatory Style?

Explanatory style, also known as Attribution style, is the way people explain the causes of events and behaviors. It is a cognitive process that involves making positive or negative inferences about an outcome.

It can be of two types: Optimistic Explanatory Style and Pessimistic Explanatory Style .

Each style can have three dimensions:

• Stable vs. unstable: Whether the cause is seen as permanent or temporary.
• Internal vs. external: Whether the cause is attributed to oneself or to external factors.
• Global vs. specific: Whether the cause is seen as affecting other areas of life or is limited to a particular situation.

People with an optimistic explanatory style tend to explain negative events as being caused by external, unstable, and specific factors, while they attribute positive events to internal, stable, and global factors.

Those with a pessimistic explanatory style do the opposite. They tend to attribute negative events to internal, stable, and global factors, while positive events to external, unstable, and specific factors.

Pessimistic people have a tendency to easily give up when facing pressures in life.

They start with the belief that the desired result is just not achievable. And even if it were, their own actions will have no effect on it.

Explanatory styles can affect a person’s emotions, behaviors, and mental health.

Seligman pointed out that learned helplessness behaviors were observed in humans who had a pessimistic explanatory style . They have low self-esteem and are likely to be depressed.

3 P’s of Pessimism

People with a pessimistic explanatory style often describe negative events as:

• P ermanent,
• P ervasive, and

In effect, pessimists tell themselves that bad events will last a long time, or forever, affect all parts of their life, and will hamper only them, not others.

In a paper published in the International Journal of Stress Management , researcher P. C. Henry wrote that people who perceive events as uncontrollable are less likely to change unhealthy patterns of behavior. It could make them neglect healthy habits like diet, exercise, and medical treatment.

Henry also found that people who had an optimistic explanatory style and therefore explain the events of their lives positively had more positive emotions, and did less negative thinking.

How to overcome learned helplessness?

You can overcome learned helplessness by changing your mindset into a more positive and optimistic outlook. You may use positive self-talk, visualization exercises, and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). With the right support and tools, you can regain a sense of control over your life.

How do you break learned helplessness? By purposefully unlearning the learned behavior. Anything you can learn, you can also unlearn.

• First, recognize that you are a victim of it.
• Then you may try to figure out why it happened to you.
• Then, remind yourself that you do have the power to change things.
• Start interpreting situations more positively and focus on things you can control.

Of course, no one can control every aspect of a difficult situation. But, focusing on things over which you have control might gradually build into feelings of positivity and optimism.

The opposite of learned helplessness is “Learned Optimism.”

Seligman wrote a book about it: Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life . In it, he writes:

“ The optimists and the pessimists: I have been studying them for the past twenty-five years. The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback, that its causes are confined to this one case. The optimists believe defeat is not their fault: Circumstances, bad luck, or other people brought it about. Such people are unfazed by defeat. Confronted by a bad situation, they perceive it as a challenge and try harder.

“I have found, however, that pessimism is escapable. “

[Martin Seligman is widely regarded as the Father of Positive Psychology . Some sub-topics in the field are resilience , mindfulness , and flow (the optimal state of happiness) .]

What are the 3 elements of “learned helplessness”?

Learned helplessness has these three elements: contingency, cognition, and conduct . It is most likely to result when one has a pessimistic explanatory style, meaning they describe negative events as permanent , pervasive , and personal .

What is the main point of Seligman’s study on learned helplessness in dogs?

The main point of Seligman’s learned helplessness experiment was to show how long difficult conditions can make an animal adopt pessimistic attitudes and behaviors.

Seligman’s depressed dogs showed that their helplessness was not simply a result of physical fatigue or apathy, but rather a state of “conditioned defeat” in which they learned that they had no control over their environment. Seligman’s dogs stopped trying to escape even when they could, having learned that they cannot stop what was happening to them.

This research helped us understand how some people can feel pessimistic and depressed, and how we can help them build a sense of control over their lives.

Can “learned helplessness” be reversed?

Yes, learned helplessness can be reversed. Since it is a learned behavior, it can be unlearned with conscious effort. A crucial aspect in overcoming it is reaffirming to oneself that one is in charge of the situation.

Final Words

Learned helplessness can be a self-fulfilling prophecy cycle , which implies what people wish for, actually comes true.

Thus, when people believe they are helpless, they resist new opportunities. This reduces their chance to change their present situation. Then this worsens their sense of helplessness.

What can really help break the cycle is realizing that no matter where you are, you can do better by taking the first step toward a happier life today.

10 Happiness Hacks From Positive Psychology

11 Proven Ways To Have A Strong Positive Mindset

Author Bio: Written and reviewed by Sandip Roy — medical doctor, psychology writer, and happiness researcher. Founder and Chief Editor of The Happiness Blog. Writes on mental health, happiness, mindfulness, positive psychology, and philosophy (especially Stoicism ).

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Dr. Sandip Roy is a medical doctor and psychology writer, with a unique focus on mental well-being, positive psychology, narcissism, and Stoicism. His warm-hearted expertise has helped many mental abuse survivors find happiness again. Co-author of 'Critique of Positive Psychology and Positive Interventions' . Find him on LinkedIn .

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When it comes to mental well-being, you don't have to do it alone. Going to therapy to feel better is a positive choice. Therapists can help you work through your trauma triggers and emotional patterns.

Learned helplessness is an acquired sense that you can no longer control your environment—so you quit trying to.

The classic experiment involves two groups of dogs. Call them groups A and B. Both groups receive strong electric shocks while strapped into a hammock.

Group A dogs can turn the shock off by pushing a panel with their little doggie snouts. They can do this anytime after the shock begins.

Each dog in Group B is “yoked” to a dog in group A—meaning that whenever the Group A dog is shocked, so is the corresponding Group B dog, and whenever the Group A dog turns off its shock, the shock is also turned off for the corresponding Group B dog. This is an elegant way of (1) ensuring that the dogs in the two groups receive exactly the same number of shocks and for the same duration, at the same time as (2) putting Group B dogs in a situation where they had no power to control their environment. For Group B dogs, the shocks seems inescapable, even though the actual physical punishment meted out to the two groups is identical.

The crux of this experiment is learning. The key question is, in a new situation where the dogs can actually help themselves, will the dogs who were able to exercise control over their circumstances learn differently compared to dogs who simply had to endure the shocks?

To test this, dogs from both groups are put in a “shuttle box,” and then presented with a conditioned stimulus (e.g. a bell) 10 seconds before the floor becomes electrified. The shuttle box has a barrier the dog can jump over, and the other side is not electrified. This is actually a standard avoidance learning task. In this task, learning can be quantified by measuring the number of seconds it takes for the dog to jump, over a period of 10 or so trials. If the dog jumps within 10 seconds of hearing the bell, it avoids the shock altogether. If it fails to jump after 60 seconds of shocking, the electricity is turned off. Let me emphasize: to avoid the shock, all the dog has to do is jump over the barrier.

For purposes of comparison, we look at dogs that have no experimental experience (Group C). As you would expect, fresh “naive” dogs hear the bell, do nothing, get shocked, and within a few seconds, scramble over the hurdle. After a couple of trials, they learn to associate the bell with the shock (classical conditioning), and they jump well before their grace period is up, thus entirely avoiding the shock.

Group A dogs learn just about as quickly as naive dogs to avoid the shock.

Here’s the interesting finding. Group B dogs, the ones who have experienced inescapable shock in the hammock, react passively. They do not look for an escape. “They lay down, whined quietly, and simply took whatever shocks were delivered. They neither avoided nor escaped; they just gave up trying.”

Why do the Group B dogs give up? Because they are conditioned to feel helpless. In the first condition, they had no control over the shocks they were getting—so they gave up trying, not just in that situation, but in all situations. Even when they’re placed in a new situation—one in which they actually have control over their fate—they don’t realize it because they don’t even look for an escape. Even after repeated trials, the Group B dogs never ever discover that they can avoid the shock simply by jumping over the hurdle.

Like the Group B dogs, many people who are depressed exhibit learned helplessness, says Martin Seligman, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist who led the experiments. Such people are passive and fail to act or take initiative because they feel like their acts are futile. Often, the person has been through an experience where she was objectively helpless in the face of personal loss, professional failure, or illness. Now, the person’s depression stems from a sense of hopelessness, a sense that she is a passive victim with no control over life’s events, that her actions are futile—i.e. that she’s helpless. Other studies have shown that learned helplessness impairs the immune system, and that “giving up hope” has negative health effects.

The good news is that learned helplessness can be unlearned: “We dragged those poor, reluctant animals back and forth across the shuttlebox over the barrier and back again, until they began to move under their own steam and came to see that their own actions worked. Once they did, the cure was one hundred percent reliable and permanent.”

Last point: a dog (or presumably, a person) can be “immunized” against learned helplessness. Dogs who learn early on that responding matters never acquire learned helplessness.

© 2024 JAY DIXIT.

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Debunked: “learned helplessness,” a theory developed from a cruel animal experiment

• In her book, Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today,  author Jane McGonigal uses insights from psychology and neuroscience to explore how we can better prepare ourselves for an uncertain future.
• In this excerpt of the book, McGonigal describes the origins of “learned helplessness,” which theorized that animals learn helplessness after being forced to learn that outcomes are independent of their responses.
• Subsequent studies found that helpless behavior is an instinctive response that we can learn to overcome.

Excerpted from  IMAGINABLE  copyright © 2022 by Jane McGonigal. Used by permission of Spiegel & Grau LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Answer the Call to Adventure

The “call to adventure” signifies that destiny has summoned the hero. — Joseph Campbell, mythologist

In 1967, a team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania conducted a controversial psychology experiment in which dogs were given electric shocks. The goal of the study was to find out how animals—and perhaps, by extension, humans—learn from adverse experiences. The dogs were restrained in a hammock, their legs dangling through four of its holes. The researchers then delivered a series of painful electric shocks to the dogs’ hind legs. For some of the dogs in the experiment, there was also a lever that they could reach with their nose. If the lever was nudged, it would stop the shocks. Most dogs quickly figured out how to stop the shocks. But for some of the dogs, the lever purposefully did not work. No matter what they did, the shocks would continue.

Twenty-four hours after the dogs endured their initial round of shocks, they were placed in a different test environment, called a “shuttle box.” The box was divided into two sections by a low barrier that the dogs could easily jump over if they tried. On one side of the box was a metal plate that could deliver more electric shocks; the other side was safe. The dogs first spent five minutes in the shuttle box, unrestrained and free to move around. Then the shocks began. To escape, all the dogs had to do was jump from one side of the box to the other. 

The researchers observed that the two groups of dogs—those who in the hammock the day before had been able to stop the shocks by nudging a lever, and those who had no way to stop the shocks—reacted very differently to the second trial. The first group of dogs all figured out how to jump over the barrier and escape the shocks quickly. But most of the dogs in the second group didn’t even try to escape the shocks. They simply lay down and endured them until the researchers ended the experiment.

Today, this kind of cruel animal research would be forbidden. But it yielded an important theory that became a cornerstone of animal and human psychology: the theory of learned helplessness . According to this theory, if we learn that outcomes are independent of our responses— that nothing we do matters—then we will internalize that lesson and carry it with us to other situations. Even if, objectively, we are not helpless, we will feel helpless. And so we will be less likely, whatever future problems we face, to take actions to better our circumstances.

This theory held up for decades, through repeated experiments with mice, monkeys, and people. The same helpless behavior appeared again and again, in animals and humans alike. It became one of the most cited explanations for clinical depression: if we experience an inability to control outcomes in multiple areas of our lives—at home, at school, at work, in our health, in our finances, in our love lives—then we learn to stop trying. Our brains tell us, “Don’t bother.” We get depressed and turn inward; we become passive, just like the dogs in the shuttle box. 

But then, something unexpected happened in the field of psychology. One of the original researchers on the University of Pennsylvania experiment, Steven F. Maier, then a graduate student, switched fields and became a neuroscientist. He decided to revisit the theory he helped establish, but this time from a neurological perspective. He started investigating which circuits, receptors, and neurotransmitters were involved with learning helplessness. And when he watched what was actually going on in the brain, he discovered that the original theory had it all backward: We don’t learn helplessness. The brain assumes helplessness when exposed to adverse conditions. If we want to feel that we have any control over our own outcomes, we have to learn that we have power .

This newer research is complicated, but the most important thing to understand is that psychologists now know that a passive, defensive strategy—or simply trying to endure the worst until it ends—is actually the most hardwired, instinctive biological response we have to bad experiences. You’ve probably heard of the “fight or flight” reaction to stress, and that’s real too. (Psychologists have updated the theory recently to include a third instinctive reaction to stress: “tend and befriend,” in which we seek and give social support.) But before fight or flight, before tend and befriend, “freeze” is actually the most primal response, the reaction that evolution initially favored. If we don’t want to freeze, we have to learn that we can fight back. We have to learn that we can take flight. We have to learn that we can ask for and give others support.

How do we learn our own power? We have to activate pathways in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) region of the brain that turn off the instinctive, helpless response—our default freeze response— which, as it turns out, is driven by a region of the brain called the dorsal raphe nucleus. The dorsal raphe nucleus responds to aversive stimuli like painfully loud noises, blinding bright lights, threats of violence, shame, or electric shocks by directing neurotransmitters to two other regions of the brain, the amygdala and the sensorimotor cortex, which stimulate fear and tell the body to “freeze.” The vmPFC only turns off the dorsal raphe nucleus response if and when we have direct experience of taking purposeful action that leads to a desired result in the face of aversive stimuli .

In other words, we have to learn that we can, in fact, turn down the noise, turn off the lights, flee the threat, soothe the shame, or escape the shocks. We have to be like the animals in the University of Pennsylvania experiment who noticed that by accidentally nudging a nearby lever, they could escape the shocks. We have to discover all the levers (whatever they might be) that allow us to exert our will and make a positive difference in our own lives, and in the lives of others, even when under duress.

What's on your mind?

Analyzing psychological studies of the 20th & 21st century, learned helplessness experiment.

In 1965, Martin Seligman was conducting an experiment to study the relationship between fear and learning in dogs. This experiment was divided into two parts.

In the first part, Seligman would ring a bell before administering a small shock to a dog. This was repeated several times until the dog learned to associate the bell with the shocking sensation. Eventually, the dog would show fear-related behavior when the bell rang, which indicated its acknowledgment of the association between the shock and bell tone.

In the second part of the experiment, the dogs that were conditioned in the first part to feel fear at the ring of a bell were placed in a crate with two compartments. The side of the crate the dogs were placed on had an electrified floor and the other side did not. The two compartments in the crate were divided by a low fence, which the dog could see and jump over easily. Seligman administered a shock from the floor and expected the dogs to jump to the other side. However, the conditioned dogs would simply sit down and accept the shocks from the floor. Non-conditioned dogs, who were not a part of the prior experiment, were then put into the crate, administered the same shock, and instead would immediately jump to the other side.

Seligman concluded that the conditioned dog had learned that trying to escape the shocks was futile, and thus would not try to escape it even in the new environment of the second experiment. He described this condition as learned helplessness and used it as a model for his future research in explaining depression.

Throughout my life, I have met many individuals who struggle with varying levels of depression and mental health issues, including members of my immediate family. I am so happy that mental health is becoming less and less of a taboo subject, however, it saddens me when I recognize the number of people that suffer from these mental health issues. Studies, such as this one done by Martin Seligman, show how easily someone can become accustomed to psychological damage and degradation. The conditioned dogs had an easy escape from the shocks directly in front of them, but they felt so helpless after several previous shocks that they accepted their state instead of reaching safety. This is directly applicable to humans struggling with depression who are unable to find an escape.

Hearing a loved one say that they are worthless and do not want to be alive is heart-wrenching, especially when you are able to see the incredible life ahead of them and they cannot seem to see or feel past their current emotional state. Although Seligman’s experiment may not be morally acceptable today (I mean no one wants a cute dog getting shocked), I hope that there is a push for breakthrough psychological research in the field of mental health. Increasing knowledge about diagnosis and treatment of mental health issues will lead to growth in acceptance and societal change that benefits those who struggle with their mental health.

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Lucid Nightmare — Psychology

In 1967 psychologists electrocuted lots of dogs in a box, what they discovered has profound implications for meme culture and the creeping anxiety that is spreading across society..

Argumentative Penguin

The Arctic Circular

W e’ll get to the electrocuted dogs in a bit. Let’s just take a step back and look at where society is. Context is important. The arrival of the internet jump started the digital age. It changed the world for the better and for the worse in a myriad of ways. It is now throwing human psychology and how we think and interact into new territory.

We have become interconnected in a way that was unfathomable a generation ago. The newest generation of children, the so called i-Gen will grow up as part of an interconnected hive mind. Their world shaped equally by humans and algorithms.

We now exist in an open source world. One in which we create the rules as we go along. A world in which the norms are ever shifting. A decade ago, it wasn’t normal for society to be so polarised. Today widespread intolerance from the both the left and the right is the status quo.

But this isn’t a generic article about the perils and pitfalls of the internet. We can discuss those ad-infinitum. This is an article about dogs…

Written by Argumentative Penguin

Playwright. Screenwriter. Penguin. Fan of rationalism and polite discourse. Find me causing chaos in the comments. Contact: [email protected]

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• Psychology , Psychology Experiments

Learned Helplessness Experiment: Doggone Attitudes

Your coach has introduced a new training method: at practice, you’ll jump hurdles while wearing weights on your legs. The idea is that after training for a while, you’ll be able to jump much higher and run much faster once the weights are off. You’re not so sure it will actually work though. Running is hard but not impossible. Jumping, however, earns you a tangled mess of limbs every time. You try different techniques, but it makes no difference. You get a few bruises on your elbow and even a skinned knee. After a week, your coach asks you to take off the weights and try jumping the hurdles without them. You get in position at the starting line and sprint to the hurdle. All you can think of is the pain of the last few falls and before you know it, you’re on the ground. Your coach is confused. “You jumped right into the hurdle - you didn’t even try to clear it.”

Somewhere in the back of your mind, you know objectively you’re capable of doing the jump. But the weight training has conditioned you to think that you can’t. Since you always fall and injure yourself with the weights on, you start to think it will always happen even when the weights are off. You perceive this suffering and failure as permanent, so you make no effort to stop it from happening.

Learned Helplessness

Learned helplessness is a phenomenon in which after experiencing pain or discomfort in an inescapable situation, an animal or human will cease trying to avoid the suffering. They have learned that they are helpless - they believe they have no control over their situation, even if there is an opportunity to escape. This kind of conditioning was famously studied in Seligman’s Learned Helplessness Experiment.

The Experiment

The notable part of the experiment was conducted in 1967 at the University of Pennsylvania by Martin Seligman and his colleagues. However, it only came about because two years prior, the researchers had been experimenting with classical conditioning, which is the process by which an animal or human comes to associate one stimulus with another. Seligman experimented with dogs: first a bell would be rung and then the dog would receive a shock. After a number of pairings, the dogs were classically conditioned - once they heard the bell, they’d react as if they’d already been shocked. 

Seligman later crafted a box with a low fence dividing its middle. One side was electrified while the other was not. The dog could easily see and jump over the fence. Seligman predicted that if a dog was placed on the electrified section, it would simply jump to safety. However, when he used the dogs from the earlier experiment as test subjects, nearly all of them did not move. They laid down on the electrified section they were placed on.

Seligman brought in a new set of animals and found that dogs who had not experienced the first classical conditioning would always jump over the fence. He concluded that the original set of dogs had learned to be helpless - they had no control in the first half of the experiment, so they assumed they would never have control. They believed there was nothing they could do to avoid the shocks, even when there was a clear option they could take to do so. Seligman called this condition “learned helplessness.”

Applying It

Learned helplessness has been observed in humans and animals. If bad things constantly happen outside of your control, you’re liable to start thinking you can never prevent them from happening. This is the case with victims of abuse, from physical to verbal to emotional. Even when escape seems possible, many won’t leave an abusive relationship or home because they think it won’t do them any good - they’ll get caught and end up right back where they started. It’s also been discussed that learned helplessness likely plays a strong role in depression and other mental illnesses. If you think you’re not in control, you believe your actions will make no difference. Just like one of Seligman’s classically conditioned dogs, you’ll lie down and give up.

But not every one of those dogs did lie down. Some still jumped the fence despite being test subjects in the first half of the experiment. Seligman later theorized that whether someone experiences learned helplessness has to do with the strength and type of their explanatory style. A pessimistic explanatory style involves personal blame for bad outcomes and beliefs that such suffering is permanent and pervasive. Meanwhile, an optimistic one involves external blame for negative events and beliefs that such suffering is temporary and local. For example, someone with an optimistic explanatory style might say, “I didn’t make the team because I didn’t practice hard enough.” The negative event is attributed to a lack of effort, something that can easily be remedied. Meanwhile, someone with a pessimistic explanatory in the same situation might say, “I didn’t make the team because I’m not good enough.” The suffering is internalized - the person believes they are inherently lackluster and can never remedy the situation. 

These outlooks play an important role. They serve almost as self-fulfilling prophecies. If you’re optimistic and perceive your situation as malleable, you will take every opportunity to change it for the better and will likely do so because you don’t give up. If you’re pessimistic and perceive your situation as fixed, you won’t bother to try to affect it and thus stay stuck in bad situations. Your outlook affects your end goals. 

Finally, it should be noted that Seligman and his colleagues did eventually get the conditioned dogs to jump over the fence. They tried many methods, but the only one that worked was picking up the dogs and moving their legs, replicating the actions the dogs themselves would need to perform to escape the electrified side. They needed to do this at least twice, i.e. create a pattern of realistic escape, before the dog would jump on its own. When someone is depressed or suffering, saying “things will get better” does no one any good. Rather, it’s better to physically show that friend that their suffering isn’t global and that they can still find happiness multiple times until they can accept that as truth on their own.

Think Further

• Why do you think Seligman’s findings were so ground-breaking?
• Who would you expect to have more success, better health, and lower rates of depression — those with optimistic or pessimistic explanatory styles? Explain your answer.
• Taking from Seligman’s experiments, what are some ways you can help someone realize they have control over a bad situation?

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Accountability

Skinner’s Box Experiment (Behaviorism Study)

We receive rewards and punishments for many behaviors. More importantly, once we experience that reward or punishment, we are likely to perform (or not perform) that behavior again in anticipation of the result. 

Psychologists in the late 1800s and early 1900s believed that rewards and punishments were crucial to shaping and encouraging voluntary behavior. But they needed a way to test it. And they needed a name for how rewards and punishments shaped voluntary behaviors. Along came Burrhus Frederic Skinner , the creator of Skinner's Box, and the rest is history.

What Is Skinner's Box?

The "Skinner box" is a setup used in animal experiments. An animal is isolated in a box equipped with levers or other devices in this environment. The animal learns that pressing a lever or displaying specific behaviors can lead to rewards or punishments.

This setup was crucial for behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner developed his theories on operant conditioning. It also aided in understanding the concept of reinforcement schedules.

Here, "schedules" refer to the timing and frequency of rewards or punishments, which play a key role in shaping behavior. Skinner's research showed how different schedules impact how animals learn and respond to stimuli.

Who is B.F. Skinner?

Burrhus Frederic Skinner, also known as B.F. Skinner is considered the “father of Operant Conditioning.” His experiments, conducted in what is known as “Skinner’s box,” are some of the most well-known experiments in psychology. They helped shape the ideas of operant conditioning in behaviorism.

Law of Effect (Thorndike vs. Skinner) 

At the time, classical conditioning was the top theory in behaviorism. However, Skinner knew that research showed that voluntary behaviors could be part of the conditioning process. In the late 1800s, a psychologist named Edward Thorndike wrote about “The Law of Effect.” He said, “Responses that produce a satisfying effect in a particular situation become more likely to occur again in that situation, and responses that produce a discomforting effect become less likely to occur again in that situation.”

Thorndike tested out The Law of Effect with a box of his own. The box contained a maze and a lever. He placed a cat inside the box and a fish outside the box. He then recorded how the cats got out of the box and ate the fish. 

Thorndike noticed that the cats would explore the maze and eventually found the lever. The level would let them out of the box, leading them to the fish faster. Once discovering this, the cats were more likely to use the lever when they wanted to get fish. 

Skinner took this idea and ran with it. We call the box where animal experiments are performed "Skinner's box."

Why Do We Call This Box the "Skinner Box?"

Edward Thorndike used a box to train animals to perform behaviors for rewards. Later, psychologists like Martin Seligman used this apparatus to observe "learned helplessness." So why is this setup called a "Skinner Box?" Skinner not only used Skinner box experiments to show the existence of operant conditioning, but he also showed schedules in which operant conditioning was more or less effective, depending on your goals. And that is why he is called The Father of Operant Conditioning.

How Skinner's Box Worked

Inspired by Thorndike, Skinner created a box to test his theory of Operant Conditioning. (This box is also known as an “operant conditioning chamber.”)

The box was typically very simple. Skinner would place the rats in a Skinner box with neutral stimulants (that produced neither reinforcement nor punishment) and a lever that would dispense food. As the rats started to explore the box, they would stumble upon the level, activate it, and get food. Skinner observed that they were likely to engage in this behavior again, anticipating food. In some boxes, punishments would also be administered. Martin Seligman's learned helplessness experiments are a great example of using punishments to observe or shape an animal's behavior. Skinner usually worked with animals like rats or pigeons. And he took his research beyond what Thorndike did. He looked at how reinforcements and schedules of reinforcement would influence behavior. 

About Reinforcements

Reinforcements are the rewards that satisfy your needs. The fish that cats received outside of Thorndike’s box was positive reinforcement. In Skinner box experiments, pigeons or rats also received food. But positive reinforcements can be anything added after a behavior is performed: money, praise, candy, you name it. Operant conditioning certainly becomes more complicated when it comes to human reinforcements.

Positive vs. Negative Reinforcements 

Skinner also looked at negative reinforcements. Whereas positive reinforcements are given to subjects, negative reinforcements are rewards in the form of things taken away from subjects. In some experiments in the Skinner box, he would send an electric current through the box that would shock the rats. If the rats pushed the lever, the shocks would stop. The removal of that terrible pain was a negative reinforcement. The rats still sought the reinforcement but were not gaining anything when the shocks ended. Skinner saw that the rats quickly learned to turn off the shocks by pushing the lever. 

About Punishments

Skinner's Box also experimented with positive or negative punishments, in which harmful or unsatisfying things were taken away or given due to "bad behavior." For now, let's focus on the schedules of reinforcement.

Schedules of Reinforcement 

We know that not every behavior has the same reinforcement every single time. Think about tipping as a rideshare driver or a barista at a coffee shop. You may have a string of customers who tip you generously after conversing with them. At this point, you’re likely to converse with your next customer. But what happens if they don’t tip you after you have a conversation with them? What happens if you stay silent for one ride and get a big tip? 

Psychologists like Skinner wanted to know how quickly someone makes a behavior a habit after receiving reinforcement. Aka, how many trips will it take for you to converse with passengers every time? They also wanted to know how fast a subject would stop conversing with passengers if you stopped getting tips. If the rat pulls the lever and doesn't get food, will they stop pulling the lever altogether?

Skinner attempted to answer these questions by looking at different schedules of reinforcement. He would offer positive reinforcements on different schedules, like offering it every time the behavior was performed (continuous reinforcement) or at random (variable ratio reinforcement.) Based on his experiments, he would measure the following:

• Response rate (how quickly the behavior was performed)
• Extinction rate (how quickly the behavior would stop) 

He found that there are multiple schedules of reinforcement, and they all yield different results. These schedules explain why your dog may not be responding to the treats you sometimes give him or why gambling can be so addictive. Not all of these schedules are possible, and that's okay, too.

Continuous Reinforcement

If you reinforce a behavior repeatedly, the response rate is medium, and the extinction rate is fast. The behavior will be performed only when reinforcement is needed. As soon as you stop reinforcing a behavior on this schedule, the behavior will not be performed.

Fixed-Ratio Reinforcement

Let’s say you reinforce the behavior every fourth or fifth time. The response rate is fast, and the extinction rate is medium. The behavior will be performed quickly to reach the reinforcement. 

Fixed-Interval Reinforcement

In the above cases, the reinforcement was given immediately after the behavior was performed. But what if the reinforcement was given at a fixed interval, provided that the behavior was performed at some point? Skinner found that the response rate is medium, and the extinction rate is medium. 

Variable-Ratio Reinforcement

Here's how gambling becomes so unpredictable and addictive. In gambling, you experience occasional wins, but you often face losses. This uncertainty keeps you hooked, not knowing when the next big win, or dopamine hit, will come. The behavior gets reinforced randomly. When gambling, your response is quick, but it takes a long time to stop wanting to gamble. This randomness is a key reason why gambling is highly addictive.

Variable-Interval Reinforcement

Last, the reinforcement is given out at random intervals, provided that the behavior is performed. Health inspectors or secret shoppers are commonly used examples of variable-interval reinforcement. The reinforcement could be administered five minutes after the behavior is performed or seven hours after the behavior is performed. Skinner found that the response rate for this schedule is fast, and the extinction rate is slow. 

Skinner's Box and Pigeon Pilots in World War II

Yes, you read that right. Skinner's work with pigeons and other animals in Skinner's box had real-life effects. After some time training pigeons in his boxes, B.F. Skinner got an idea. Pigeons were easy to train. They can see very well as they fly through the sky. They're also quite calm creatures and don't panic in intense situations. Their skills could be applied to the war that was raging on around him.

B.F. Skinner decided to create a missile that pigeons would operate. That's right. The U.S. military was having trouble accurately targeting missiles, and B.F. Skinner believed pigeons could help. He believed he could train the pigeons to recognize a target and peck when they saw it. As the pigeons pecked, Skinner's specially designed cockpit would navigate appropriately. Pigeons could be pilots in World War II missions, fighting Nazi Germany.

When Skinner proposed this idea to the military, he was met with skepticism. Yet, he received $25,000 to start his work on "Project Pigeon." The device worked! Operant conditioning trained pigeons to navigate missiles appropriately and hit their targets. Unfortunately, there was one problem. The mission killed the pigeons once the missiles were dropped. It would require a lot of pigeons! The military eventually passed on the project, but cockpit prototypes are on display at the American History Museum. Pretty cool, huh?

Examples of Operant Conditioning in Everyday Life

Not every example of operant conditioning has to end in dropping missiles. Nor does it have to happen in a box in a laboratory! You might find that you have used operant conditioning on yourself, a pet, or a child whose behavior changes with rewards and punishments. These operant conditioning examples will look into what this process can do for behavior and personality.

Hot Stove: If you put your hand on a hot stove, you will get burned. More importantly, you are very unlikely to put your hand on that hot stove again. Even though no one has made that stove hot as a punishment, the process still works.

Tips: If you converse with a passenger while driving for Uber, you might get an extra tip at the end of your ride. That's certainly a great reward! You will likely keep conversing with passengers as you drive for Uber. The same type of behavior applies to any service worker who gets tips!

Training a Dog: If your dog sits when you say “sit,” you might treat him. More importantly, they are likely to sit when you say, “sit.” (This is a form of variable-ratio reinforcement. Likely, you only treat your dog 50-90% of the time they sit. If you gave a dog a treat every time they sat, they probably wouldn't have room for breakfast or dinner!)

Operant Conditioning Is Everywhere!

We see operant conditioning training us everywhere, intentionally or unintentionally! Game makers and app developers design their products based on the "rewards" our brains feel when seeing notifications or checking into the app. Schoolteachers use rewards to control their unruly classes. Dog training doesn't always look different from training your child to do chores. We know why this happens, thanks to experiments like the ones performed in Skinner's box. 

Related posts:

• Operant Conditioning (Examples + Research)
• Edward Thorndike (Psychologist Biography)
• Schedules of Reinforcement (Examples)
• B.F. Skinner (Psychologist Biography)
• Fixed Ratio Reinforcement Schedule (Examples)

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Mrs. Eplin's IB Psychology Class Blog

Learned Helplessness 1965

By: Valentina Batres

Aim: In 1965, psychologists Mark Seligman and and Steve Maier conducted an experiment to see if helplessness can be taught. They wanted to test the reaction of dogs towards electric shocks (if they would avoid the shocks or not).

Procedure: Seligman started off this experiment by placing individual dogs into a box. He then gave out an electric shock, which the dogs could avoid by jumping out of the box. Each dog learned this very quickly. However, he then leashed a group of dogs together and adminstered several shocks which they could not escape. These same dogs were then placed individually in the original box.

Results: The dogs displayed learned helplessness. Although they could have easily jumped out of the box, neither of them did. The group of dogs that were harnessed together ended up showing signs of clinical depression.

Analysis: This learned helplessness experiment was very unethical. This experiment was unethical because it caused the dogs to become depressed which is abuse. The dogs also could not withdraw from this experiment. They were not aware of the researchers intentions meaning it was not informed consent. He ignored the feelings of the dogs towards the electric shocks for his own research benefits.

Work Cited: 20 Most Unethical Experiments in Psychology. (n.d.). September 10, 2018, from https://www.onlinepsychologydegree.info/unethical-experiements-psychology/

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Published by IB Psychology 2018-2019

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5 thoughts on “ Learned Helplessness 1965 ”

I like the lasting impact it could have on how people and kids learn and different tools teachers could use in order to teach them. Kiah garrison

This study created an impact that helped be applied to humans. Although it is unethical, it was a purposeful study done with intent to learn about psychological tendencies. Jordan Marley-Weaver

Even though they got lasting results from the study, I still think it is unethical and should not have been performed in the first place. It was causing unnecessary harm to the animals, which was abuse. Ellie Panicola

Although we did learn from this experiment it is unfair to the dogs because they received long lasting effects and were deceived. I would say this is an unethical experiment especially because it seems that the dogs were never treated for their depression. Jennifer Batres

This experiment is very unethical, it caused the dogs undue stress which caused them to develop depression. Also after the experiment the dogs were not treated for the harm that was caused to them. -donya alhussainy

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Thomas Edison Thought It Was a Bright Idea to Electrocute Animals

By Lauren Oyler

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Most people stop thinking about Thomas Edison after they learn he invented the incandescent light bulb. That’s fine with me! However, he also invented many other things: Among his 1,093 patents were those for the phonograph, an early method of vacuum-sealing fruit , and scary dolls that spoke in high-pitched shrieks or Edison’s own deep, adult male voice . According to historian Maury Klein , Edison was “probably the most brilliant inventor America ever had.” While Klein notes in the same breath that he was also “capable of spectacularly wrong choices,” this is a real understatement: In reality, Edison was a ruthlessly competitive businessman who sacrificed his relationships with his family, the wellbeing of many artists, and the lives of countless animals in his quest to dominate in his various endeavors.

Born in Ohio in 1847, Thomas Alva Edison developed an entrepreneurial spirit early; after he was pulled out of school for being hyper, he began selling candy and newspapers and conducting experiments with chemicals in his basement. (Because he stored these chemicals in a locker on a train, he can be said to have caused at least one train fire.) Despite a lack of formal schooling, he quickly went on to become the 19th-century version of a gray-hoodied college-dropout programmer; his first boon came in 1869, when at the age of 22 he earned $40,000 for an improvement on the stock ticker .

Was Edison hot ? Photo via Wikimedia Commons

From there, Edison established a laboratory and went on a veritable inventing spree, though people on various forums argue that he deserves more credit for being a canny businessman and manager than for his skills as a scientist. The most notorious and sketchy of Edison’s efforts towards world domination began in the early 1880s and would last for many years. Often referred to as the “ War of Currents ,” the long-running battle between Edison and the industrialist George Westinghouse centered on which man would control the American electricity system. On one side, there was Edison, whose invention of the light bulb in 1879 was supported by a direct current (DC) electrical system of his own design. Although Edison knew the development of DC would stand to earn him hefty royalties as others used the system to generate hydroelectricity to power cities, he also feared DC’s limitations: It couldn’t travel long distances without losing a lot of energy. Opposing Edison was Westinghouse, who believed in another system: alternating current (AC), which the young Serbian engineer Nikola Tesla had originally developed for Edison. (Edison told Tesla his effort was cute but totally impractical, and sent him on his way.)

Once Westinghouse began setting up AC generators around the country, Edison started to get worried, so he initiated what Smithsonian magazine calls a “great political, legal and marketing game” to “ruin” Westinghouse. Part of this great game involved Edison staging live electrocution events—in which he used AC power to kill stray dogs, horses, and cattle—to make the point that his rival’s current was too heinously dangerous for public usage.

Nice. Edison was ultimately wrong—AC is primarily what we use today—but he was able to take his hubris pretty far. While some biographers suggest that Edison might have genuinely believed AC was a menace unto society—he was really pure of heart!—no one disputes the fact that many of God’s creations died because of his hell-bent convictions (or, you know, his megalomania). Near the turn of the century, Edison secretly funded the development of the world’s first electric chair after Westinghouse refused to offer his generators to the enterprise; although Edison himself was against the death penalty, he wanted to prove his enemy’s electricity was deadly. The first convicted murderer, William Kemmler, to be executed in the chair learned the hard way that brilliant inventor Edison was full of shit; it ultimately took two tries and several minutes to execute Kemmler, whose tortured agony and burning flesh sent spectators fleeing from the room .

Read more: Albert Einstein Was a Genius at Treating His Wives Like Shit

On January 4, 1903, the War of Currents culminated in the spectacle electrocution of the Luna Park Zoo’s cranky elephant Topsy, who had killed three people (including one trainer who tried to feed her a lit cigarette) and was deemed dangerous to humankind. The sad extant video of Topsy’s execution offers a nice segue into Edison’s other major vehicle for being a jerk: film. While Edison’s poor judgment in the War of Currents is perhaps his most famous fuck-up—it incited a spate of back-and-forths when the Oatmeal published a comic portraying him as a villain and Tesla an angelic science unicorn in 2012—he was also a merciless thug who attempted a monopoly on the movie-making business. According to an episode of Cinefix’s web series Film School’d , Edison was the original enemy of Prince, pirating countless film negatives (both domestic and international) and putting his name on them for profit. He took this so far as to establish “the Trust,” a group of men hired to prevent the rolling of any camera that wasn’t earning Edison money. They supposedly enforced their rule by firing bullets into cameras rolling on non-Edison productions.

On top of all this, of course, Edison was a hard-to-please father and neglectful husband. When his sons attempted to follow in his technological footsteps, the elder Edison would harshly criticize them for their failures; Thomas Sr. once called Thomas Jr. “ absolutely illiterate scientifically and otherwise .” Like many of history’s great men, he was always in the laboratory, frequently forgetting anniversaries and birthdays. And although another son, William, studied at Yale, served in WWI, and invented new versions for spark plugs, Edison repeatedly told him he had “brought the blush of shame” to his cheek.

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As a college student, B. F. Skinner gave little thought to psychology. He had hoped to become a novelist, and majored in English. Then, in 1927, when he was twenty-three, he read an essay by H. G. Wells about the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. The piece, which appeared in the Times Magazine , was ostensibly a review of the English translation of Pavlov’s “Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex.” But, as Wells pointed out, it was “not an easy book to read,” and he didn’t spend much time on it. Instead, Wells described Pavlov, whose systematic approach to physiology had revolutionized the study of medicine, as “a star which lights the world, shining down a vista hitherto unexplored.”

That unexplored world was the mechanics of the human brain. Pavlov had noticed, in his research on the digestive system of dogs, that they drooled as soon as they saw the white lab coats of the people who fed them. They didn’t need to see, let alone taste, the food in order to react physically. Dogs naturally drooled when fed: that was, in Pavlov’s terms, an “unconditional” reflex. When they drooled in response to a sight or sound that was associated with food by mere happenstance, a “conditional reflex” (to a “conditional stimulus”) had been created. Pavlov had formulated a basic psychological principle—one that also applied to human beings—and discovered an objective way to measure how it worked.

Skinner was enthralled. Two years after reading the Times Magazine piece, he attended a lecture that Pavlov delivered at Harvard and obtained a signed picture, which adorned his office wall for the rest of his life. Skinner and other behaviorists often spoke of their debt to Pavlov, particularly to his view that free will was an illusion, and that the study of human behavior could be reduced to the analysis of observable, quantifiable events and actions.

But Pavlov never held such views, according to “Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science” (Oxford), an exhaustive new biography by Daniel P. Todes, a professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In fact, much of what we thought we knew about Pavlov has been based on bad translations and basic misconceptions. That begins with the popular image of a dog slavering at the ringing of a bell. Pavlov “never trained a dog to salivate to the sound of a bell,” Todes writes. “Indeed, the iconic bell would have proven totally useless to his real goal, which required precise control over the quality and duration of stimuli (he most frequently employed a metronome, a harmonium, a buzzer, and electric shock).”

Pavlov is perhaps best known for introducing the idea of the conditioned reflex, although Todes notes that he never used that term. It was a bad translation of the Russian uslovnyi , or “conditional,” reflex. For Pavlov, the emphasis fell on the contingent, provisional nature of the association—which enlisted other reflexes he believed to be natural and unvarying. Drawing upon the brain science of the day, Pavlov understood conditional reflexes to involve a connection between a point in the brain’s subcortex, which supported instincts, and a point in its cortex, where associations were built. Such conjectures about brain circuitry were anathema to the behaviorists, who were inclined to view the mind as a black box. Nothing mattered, in their view, that could not be observed and measured. Pavlov never subscribed to that theory, or shared their disregard for subjective experience. He considered human psychology to be “one of the last secrets of life,” and hoped that rigorous scientific inquiry could illuminate “the mechanism and vital meaning of that which most occupied Man—our consciousness and its torments.” Of course, the inquiry had to start somewhere. Pavlov believed that it started with data, and he found that data in the saliva of dogs.

Pavlov’s research originally had little to do with psychology; it focussed on the ways in which eating excited salivary, gastric, and pancreatic secretions. To do that, he developed a system of “sham” feeding. Pavlov would remove a dog’s esophagus and create an opening, a fistula, in the animal’s throat, so that, no matter how much the dog ate, the food would fall out and never make it to the stomach. By creating additional fistulas along the digestive system and collecting the various secretions, he could measure their quantity and chemical properties in great detail. That research won him the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. But a dog’s drool turned out to be even more meaningful than he had first imagined: it pointed to a new way to study the mind, learning, and human behavior.

“Essentially, only one thing in life is of real interest to us—our psychical experience,” he said in his Nobel address. “Its mechanism, however, was and still is shrouded in profound obscurity. All human resources—art, religion, literature, philosophy, and the historical sciences—all have joined in the attempt to throw light upon this darkness. But humanity has at its disposal yet another powerful resource—natural science with its strict objective methods.”

Pavlov had become a spokesman for the scientific method, but he was not averse to generalizing from his results. “That which I see in dogs,” he told a journalist, “I immediately transfer to myself, since, you know, the basics are identical.”

Ivan Pavlov was born in 1849 in the provincial Russian city of Ryazan, the first of ten children. As the son of a priest, he attended church schools and the theological seminary. But he struggled with religion from an early age and, in 1869, left the seminary to study physiology and chemistry at St. Petersburg University. His father was furious, but Pavlov was undeterred. He never felt comfortable with his parents—or, as this biography makes clear, with almost anyone else. Not long after “The Brothers Karamazov” was published, Pavlov confessed to his future wife, Seraphima Vasilievna Karchevskaya, who was a friend of Dostoyevsky’s, that he identified with the rationalist Ivan Karamazov, whose brutal skepticism condemned him, as Todes notes, to nihilism and breakdown. “The more I read, the more uneasy my heart became,” Pavlov wrote in a letter to Karchevskaya. “Say what you will, but he bears a great resemblance to your tender and loving admirer.”

Pavlov entered the intellectual world of St. Petersburg at an ideal moment for a man eager to explore the rules that govern the material world. The tsar had freed the serfs in 1861, helping to push Russia into the convulsive century that followed. Darwin’s theory of evolution was starting to reverberate across Europe. Science began to matter in Russia in a way it hadn’t before. At the university, Pavlov’s freshman class in inorganic chemistry was taught by Dmitri Mendeleev, who, a year earlier, had created the periodic table of the elements as a teaching tool. The Soviets would soon assign religion to the dustbin of history, but Pavlov got there ahead of them. For him, there was no religion except the truth. “It is for me a kind of God, before whom I reveal everything, before whom I discard wretched worldly vanity,” he wrote. “I always think to base my virtue, my pride, upon the attempt, the wish for truth , even if I cannot attain it.” One day, while walking to his lab at the Institute for Experimental Medicine, Pavlov watched with amazement as a medical student stopped in front of a church and crossed himself. “Think about it!” Pavlov told his colleagues. “A naturalist, a physician, but he prays like an old woman in an almshouse!”

Pavlov was not a pleasant person. Todes presents him as a volatile child, a difficult student, and, frequently, a nasty adult. For decades, his lab staff knew to stay away, if at all possible, on his “angry days,” and there were many. As a member of the liberal intelligentsia, he was opposed to restrictive measures aimed at Jews, but in his personal life he freely voiced anti-Semitic sentiments. Pavlov once referred to “that vile yid, Trotsky,” and, when complaining about the Bolsheviks in 1928, he told W. Horsley Gantt, an American scientist who spent years in his lab, that Jews occupied “high positions everywhere,” and that it was “a shame that the Russians cannot be rulers of their own land.”

In lectures, Pavlov insisted that medicine had to be grounded in science, on data that could be explained, verified, and analyzed, and on studies that could be repeated. Drumming up support among physicians for the scientific method may seem banal today, but at the end of the nineteenth century it wasn’t an easy sell. In Russia, and even to some degree in the West, physiology was still considered a “theoretical science,” and the connection between basic research and medical treatments seemed tenuous. Todes argues that Pavlov’s devotion to repeated experimentation was bolstered by the model of the factory, which had special significance in a belatedly industrializing Russia. Pavlov’s lab was essentially a physiology factory, and the dogs were his machines.

To study them, he introduced a rigorous experimental approach that helped transform medical research. He recognized that meaningful changes in physiology could be assessed only over time. Rather than experiment on an animal once and then kill it, as was common, Pavlov needed to keep his dogs alive. He referred to these studies as “chronic experiments.” They typically involved surgery. “During chronic experiments, when the animal, having recovered from its operation, is under lengthy observation, the dog is irreplaceable,” he noted in 1893.

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The dogs may have been irreplaceable, but their treatment would undoubtedly cause an outcry today. Todes writes that in early experiments Pavlov was constantly stymied by the difficulty of keeping his subjects alive after operating on them. One particularly productive dog had evidently set a record by producing active pancreatic juice for ten days before dying. The loss was a tremendous disappointment to Pavlov. “Our passionate desire to extend experimental trials on such a rare animal was foiled by its death as a result of extended starvation and a series of wounds,” Pavlov wrote at the time. As a result, “the expected resolution of many important and controversial questions” had been delayed, awaiting another champion test subject.

If Pavlov’s notes were voluminous, Todes’s own investigations are hardly modest. He spent years researching this biography and has made excellent use of archives in Russia, Europe, and the United States. No scholar of Pavlov or of the disciplines he inspired will be able to ignore this achievement. The book’s eight hundred and fifty-five pages are filled with a vast accumulation of data, although the reader might have been better served if Todes had left some of it out. No minutia appears to have been too obscure to include. Here is Todes describing data that Pavlov had assembled from one extended experiment: “The total amount of secretion in trials 6 and 8 is too low, and the slope of these curves diverges markedly at several points from that in trial 1. Trial 9 fits trial 1 more snugly than does trial 5 in terms of total secretion, but the amount of secretion more than doubles in the second hour, contrasting sharply with the slight decline in trial 1. Trial 10 is again a good fit in terms of total amount of secretion, but the amount of secretion rises inappropriately in the fourth hour.” The diligent reader can also learn, in excruciating detail, what time Pavlov took each meal during summer holidays (dinner at precisely 12:30 P . M ., tea at four, and supper at eight), how many cups of tea he typically consumed each afternoon (between six and ten), and where the roses were planted in his garden (“around the spruce tree on the west side of the veranda”). It’s hard not to wish that Todes had been a bit less devoted to his subject’s prodigious empiricism.

For more than thirty years, Pavlov’s physiology factory turned out papers, new research techniques, and, of course, gastric juice—a lot of it. On a good day, a hungry dog could produce a thousand cubic centimetres, more than a quart. Although this was a sideline for Pavlov, the gastric fluids of a dog became a popular treatment for dyspepsia, and not just in Russia. A “gastric juice factory” was set up for the purpose. “An assistant was hired and paid thirty rubles a month to oversee the facility,” Todes writes. “Five large young dogs, weighing sixty to seventy pounds and selected for their voracious appetites, stood on a long table harnessed to the wooden crossbeam directly above their heads. Each was equipped with an esophagotomy and fistula from which a tube led to the collection vessel. Each ‘factory dog’ faced a short wooden stand tilted to display a large bowl of minced meat.” By 1904, the venture was selling more than three thousand flagons of gastric juice annually, Todes writes, and the profits helped increase the lab budget by about seventy per cent. The money was helpful. So was the apparent demonstration that a product created in an experimental laboratory could become useful to doctors all over the world.

At the turn of the century, Pavlov had begun focussing his research on “psychic secretions”: drool produced by anything other than direct exposure to food. He spent most of the next three decades exploring the ways conditional reflexes could be created, refined, and extinguished. Before feeding a dog, Pavlov might set a metronome at, say, sixty beats a minute. The next time the dog heard a metronome at any speed, it would salivate. But when only that particular metronome setting was reinforced with food the dog became more discriminating. Pavlov deduced that there were colliding forces of “excitation” and “inhibition” at play—so that, at first, the stimulus spreads across the cerebral cortex and then, in the second phase, it concentrates at one specific spot.

As his formulations and models grew more complex, Pavlov was encouraged in his hope that he would be able to approach psychology through physiology. “It would be stupid to reject the subjective world,” he remarked later. “Our actions, all forms of social and personal life are formed on this basis. . . . The question is how to analyze this subjective world.”

Pavlov was sixty-eight and had been famous for years when Lenin came to power, and Todes is at his best in describing the scientist’s relationship with the regime that he would serve for the rest of his life. Pavlov harbored no sentimental attachment to the old order, which had never been aggressive in funding scientific research. The Bolsheviks promised to do better (and, eventually, they did). Yet Pavlov considered Communism a “doomed” experiment that had turned Russia back into a nation of serfs. “Of course, in the struggle between labor and capital the government must stand for the protection of the worker,” he said in a speech. “But what have we made of this? . . . That which constitutes the culture, the intellectual strength of the nation, has been devalued, and that which for now remains a crude force, replaceable by a machine, has been moved to the forefront. All this, of course, is doomed to destruction as a blind rejection of reality.”

Lenin had too many other problems to spend his time worrying about one angry scientist. At first, Pavlov, his wife, and their four children were treated like any other Soviet citizens. Their Nobel Prize money was confiscated as property of the state. From 1917 to 1920, like most residents of Petrograd, which would soon be called Leningrad, the Pavlovs struggled to feed themselves and to keep from freezing. It was nearly a full-time occupation; at least a third of Pavlov’s colleagues at the Russian Academy of Sciences died in those first post-revolutionary years. “Some starved to death in apartments just above or below his own in the Academy’s residence,” Todes writes. Pavlov grew potatoes and other vegetables right outside his lab, and when he was sick a colleague provided small amounts of firewood to burn at home.

In 1920, Pavlov wrote to Lenin’s secretary, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, seeking permission to emigrate, although, as Todes points out, it was probably not yet necessary to ask. Pavlov wanted to see if, as he suspected, universities in Europe or America would fund his research in circumstances that would prevent his dogs and lab workers from starving. Bonch-Bruevich turned the letter over to Lenin, who immediately grasped the public-relations repercussions of losing the country’s most celebrated scientist. He instructed Petrograd Party leaders to increase rations for Pavlov and his family, and to make sure his working conditions improved.

The Soviets came to regard Pavlov as a scientific version of Marx. The comparison could not entirely have pleased Pavlov, who rebelled at the “divine” authority accorded Marx (“that fool”) and denied that his own “approach represents pure materialism.” Indeed, where others thought that the notion of free will would come to be discarded once we had a full understanding of how the mind worked, Pavlov was, at least at times, inclined to think the opposite. “We would have freedom of the will in proportion to our knowledge of the brain,” he told Gantt in 1927, just as “we had passed from a position of slave to a lord of nature.”

That year, Stalin began a purge of intellectuals. Pavlov was outraged. At a time when looking at the wrong person in the wrong way was enough to send a man to the gulag, he wrote to Stalin saying that he was “ashamed to be called a Russian.” Nikolai Bukharin, who considered Pavlov indispensable, made the case for him: “I know that he does not sing the ‘Internationale,’ ” Bukharin wrote to Valerian Kuibyshev, the head of the state planning committee. “But . . . despite all his grumbling, ideologically (in his works, not in his speeches) he is working for us.”

Stalin agreed. Pavlov prospered even at the height of the Terror. By 1935-36, he was running three separate laboratories and overseeing the work of hundreds of scientists and technicians. He was permitted to collaborate with scholars in Europe and America. Still, his relationship with the government was never easy. Soviet leaders even engaged in a debate over whether to celebrate his eightieth birthday. “A new nonsensical letter from academician Pavlov,” Molotov wrote in the margin of a letter of complaint before it was passed to Stalin. Kuibyshev was deeply opposed to any state recognition. “Pavlov spits on the Soviets, declares himself an open enemy, yet Soviet power would for some reason honor him,” he grumbled. “Help him we must,” he said at the time, “but not honor him.” For a while, Kuibyshev prevailed, but in 1936, when Pavlov died, at eighty-six, a hundred thousand mourners, including Party officials, filed past his casket as he lay in state.

What Todes describes as Pavlov’s “grand quest”—to rely on saliva drops and carefully calibrated experiments to understand the mechanics of human psychology—lives on, in various forms. Classical conditioning remains a critical tool: it is widely used to treat psychiatric disorders, particularly phobias. But the greater pursuit is for a kind of unified field theory in which psychology and physiology—the subjective and the material realms—would finally be integrated.

And so we have entered the age of the brain. The United States and other countries have embarked upon brain-mapping initiatives, and Pavlov would have endorsed their principal goal: to create a dynamic picture of the brain that demonstrates, at the cellular level, how neural circuits interact. As Todes points out, while Pavlov examined saliva in his attempts to understand human psychology, today we use fMRIs in our heightened search for the function of every neuron. When he delivered his lectures on the “larger hemispheres of the brain,” Pavlov declared, “We will hope and patiently await the time when a precise and complete knowledge of our highest organ, the brain, will become our profound achievement and the main foundation of a durable human happiness.” We are still waiting, but less patiently than before. ♦

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The Cruel Animal Testing Behind Thomas Edison's Quest to Show the Dangers of Alternating Current

The ‘war of the currents’ between edison and tesla is one of history’s most famous rivalries. edison’s desperate bid to win took him to a shockingly dark place..

This story originally appeared in our November/December 2021 issue as "Cruel Inventions."  Click here  to subscribe to read more stories like this one.

The crowd in the auditorium had no idea what they were about to witness, but the appearance of the dog put them instantly on guard. It was July 1888, at Columbia College in New York, and an electrician named Harold Brown had dragged a 76-pound Newfoundland mix onstage and forced it into a wooden cage surrounded by wire mesh.

While the dog cowered, Brown read a paper about the merits of alternating current (AC) versus direct current (DC), with an emphasis on how alternating current was deadlier. Upon finishing, he proceeded to do what everyone present feared, wrapping wet cotton around the dog’s right forelimb and left hind limb, then wrapping the cotton with bare copper wire. The wire was connected to a generator, and when everything was ready, Brown flipped the switch.

After each pulse — some AC, some DC — the dog howled and quaked, and once slammed so hard against the cage that its head ripped through the wire mesh. Eventually, after an AC pulse, it died. One witness said the demonstration made a bullfight look like a petting zoo. Brown, meanwhile, was elated. He felt he’d proved his main point: that AC was deadlier than DC, since AC had killed. He knew this would be music to the ears of his benefactor, too, the man who’d sponsored the torture of the Newfoundland as well as several other animals — that American saint, Thomas Edison.

We all know the story. Despite less than three months of formal schooling, Thomas Alva Edison, through a mixture of gumption and genius, helped invent (or at least develop) dozens of innovative technologies — stock tickers, vote recorders, movie cameras, fire alarms, and more. And while Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb, he and his team of tinkerers did turn a dim, fragile, expensive fire hazard into a cheap, reliable device capable of illuminating the world.

That said, Edison could be a real bastard sometimes. He and his assistants all put in grueling hours, regularly working past midnight and sleeping in closets at the lab. But Edison alone hogged the glory for “his” inventions. He was a backstabbing businessman, too. Many people agreed with one executive who sneered that Edison “had a vacuum where his conscience ought to be.”

In the 1880s, Edison came up with his killer idea: wiring cities for electricity. Even at that time, the residents of most big cities walked around beneath a cat’s cradle of wires strung overhead. These were mostly telegraph and arc-lighting wires, specialized for one purpose and restricted to certain businesses. Edison proposed threading electrical wires into every business, and even into people’s homes. What’s more, Edison’s wires wouldn’t be restricted to one purpose, but would supply power for everything — motors, looms, lightbulbs, you name it.

He understood, as few contemporaries did, just how revolutionary electricity would be — and he wanted to be the man to power America. It was a grand vision. But scientists with delusions of grandeur like this often fall for the meansend fallacy. They convince themselves that their research will usher in a scientific utopia, and that the bliss of that utopia will supersede, by many orders of magnitude, any suffering they’re causing in the short term. That’s certainly the stance Edison took with electricity and animals. However, as history shows, when we sacrifice morals for scientific progress, we often end up with neither.

A Bright Idea

There was one big problem with Edison’s plan to wire cities: His patents relied on direct current. Direct current is like a river, a flow of electrons= in one direction only. Alternating current, in contrast, is like a fast tide: The electrons flow first one way, then another, alternating direction dozens of times per second.

The problem with direct current was that DC powerlines — which carried the electricity from power plants into homes and factories — needed fat, expensive copper wires, while AC systems didn’t. As a bonus, thanks to higher electrical voltage, AC systems didn’t need to have power plants every few blocks; a single plant could serve a whole city. All these factors put Edison’s plan to wire cities with DC at a big disadvantage.

Still, alternating current back then did have one major downside — poor equipment. Unlike with DC, no Edisons had invested their time and genius in making good, reliable AC motors, generators, and transmission gear. As a result, Edison believed that his superior machinery — coupled with his glittering public reputation — would overcome the high cost of plant construction and copper wires and give him a decisive edge in the marketplace. It all might have worked out that way, too, if not for a young Serbian immigrant named Nikola Tesla.

After studying electrical engineering in Europe, the 28-year-old Tesla traveled to the United States in 1884; he arrived with 4 cents, a book of poems, and a glowing letter recommending him to Edison. Impressed, the 37-yearold Edison hired Tesla as an engineer, but the two clashed over scientific differences. Edison favored DC, while Tesla believed the future belonged to AC. After quitting the job, Tesla landed with entrepreneur George Westinghouse, who was investing heavily in AC technology.

For Edison, what historians now call the War of the Currents was only partly about money. Yes, he wanted to fund his beloved research lab, but he’d also made his reputation as an electrical wizard, and the thought of being bested in this arena enraged him and threatened his scientific ego. Losing would threaten not only his bank account but his sense of self; the danger was personal. He therefore began slandering AC power in newspapers, claiming it would kill people left and right.

And Edison soon decided that smears weren’t enough. He needed to show people the dangers of AC — make them cringe. In short, in a dog-eat-dog world, he decided the best way to get ahead would be to kill some actual dogs.

Shocking Science

Brown, who led the demonstration at Columbia, was an electrician who more or less worshipped Edison, going so far as to write an incendiary letter to a newspaper denouncing AC. But his diatribe was criticized by several engineers, who maintained that he had too little evidence to support his claims about the dangers of AC. So despite having never met Edison, Brown wrote and asked whether he could use the labs there to generate more evidence — by helping Edison electrocute dogs.

To Brown’s surprise, Edison agreed. In truth, opening up his lab to strangers wasn’t unusual for Edison, who could be quite generous at times. In this case, he even loaned Brown his top assistant to help out. What was unusual here were the conditions Edison put on the work. Normally Edison encouraged collegiality and the open exchange of ideas — the scientific ideal. But he told Brown to keep mum about these experiments. He also restricted Brown to working at night, so that people wouldn’t hear the howls.

Someone posted a sign near Edison’s lab offering a quarter apiece for stray dogs, and local ruffians came through by capturing them in droves. Brown planned to electrocute the mutts systematically, but in reality, the work was haphazard. The dogs differed wildly in size — setters, terriers, Saint Bernards, bulldogs — and he zapped them with both DC and AC at anywhere from 300 to 1400 volts. The results were nevertheless consistent — an uninterrupted litany of suffering.

After a month of this, Brown felt confident enough to arrange for the demonstration described above, where he tormented a Newfoundland mix at Columbia. The newspaper coverage was outraged, and any normal man would have slunk away in shame. Brown, in contrast, staged another demo a few days later, killing three more dogs with alternating current and allowing doctors to dissect them afterward. All in all, he reported to Edison’s assistant, the experiments were a “fine exhibit” about the dangers of AC.

Others disagreed. Not only was Brown being cruel, they argued, but his experiments proved nothing. In shocking some of the dogs with DC first, he’d battered and weakened them, making it impossible to determine how much each type of current had contributed to their deaths. Furthermore, dogs were small animals. If humans were shocked with AC, there was no guarantee they’d react the same way.

In response to these criticisms, Brown held yet another demonstration in December 1888, at Edison’s lab. This time he electrocuted big animals, and used AC alone to do so. He started with a 124-pound calf, attaching an electrode between its eyes; 770 volts dropped it.

Eventually, Edison’s team would kill 44 dogs, six calves, and two horses in their quest to discredit alternating current. But none of these deaths did any good — Westinghouse continued to crush Edison in the marketplace. By the end of 1888, Edison’s company was building and selling enough equipment to power 44,000 lightbulbs per year. Westinghouse sold enough equipment to power 48,000 lightbulbs in October 1888 alone.

Edison eventually conceded defeat in the War of the Currents. Few people in history can match his record of innovations, but his beloved direct current played almost no role in the 20th-century revolution in cheap electric power transmission. The real shame was that he didn’t bow out with grace, and spare those horses, calves, and dogs the pain and indignity of electrocution.

Animal Testing Today

It might be tempting to excuse Edison and Brown’s behavior on the grounds that theirs was a different era, a time when society simply didn’t treat animals well. But many people back then (such as Voltaire and Samuel Johnson) did protest cruel scientific research, and had been doing so long before Edison’s day.

Conditions have clearly improved since Edison’s time, but experiments involving animals remain controversial today, even among some scientists. This is partly due to the sheer number of animals that die. Medical research exploded in the second half of the 20th century, and by the year 2000, American scientists alone were going through half a billion mice, rats, and birds per year, plus dogs, cats, and monkeys on top of that. The scale is staggering.

The obvious rejoinder is that animal research saves human lives, through the development of drugs and other treatments. While that’s certainly true, there are caveats. However useful animal research was in the past, it often falls short of expectations nowadays. One survey of 26 known human carcinogens found that fewer than half also caused cancer in rodents; you might as well flip a coin to get the same result.

Things are even worse with new medicines. In 2007, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services admitted that “nine out of ten experimental drugs fail in clinical studies because we cannot accurately predict how they will behave in people based on laboratory and animal studies.” Such failures are in fact so common they’re almost cliché. How many times have we heard about some amazing therapy that miraculously stops cancer or Alzheimer’s disease in mice — only to watch it flop in human beings?

Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us. Evolutionarily, rodents and humans diverged 70 million years ago, back when dinosaurs still ruled the Earth, and we have notably different physiologies. Penicillin is actually fatal to that proverbial lab animal, the guinea pig; had scientists initially tested this drug on them, it never would have made it to market. Given these facts, some critics of animal testing have been scathing. One called animal research “an internally self-consistent universe with little contact with medical reality.”

In the past few decades, there’s been a movement to cut back on the number of animals used in labs and find alternatives. Possible alternatives include running tests on human organs grown in dishes (organoids) or using computer programs to estimate the efficacy of new chemicals by comparing them to known compounds.

In all, life is vastly better for research animals today compared to the 1880s. But reports of abuse still pop up in labs around the world, and outré experiments (like monkey head transplants) have not ceased. The howls of Edison’s dogs continue to echo today.

Sam Kean is a New York Times bestselling author whose works include The Icepick Surgeon and The Disappearing Spoon. His writing has appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing.

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The real story behind 'The Current War,' about Edison, Tesla and Westinghouse

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Did Edison publicly electrocute people's pets to present AC current as dangerous?

Kind of related to the question specific to Topsy the elephant , the (somewhat famous) Oatmeal comic about Tesla claims, among other things, that Edison would pay schoolboys to kidnap people's pets, after which he would publicly electrocute them.

Verifying this claim is rather difficult; electrocuting animals was indeed a thing during the War of Currents and many articles cite more famous cases, like the one with Topsy. In addition, it seems it was actually Harold P. Brown and not Edison himself who advocated electrocuting animals (some accounts, however, suggest Edison hired him to do so).

That said, I found these two sources:

Edison the Executioner claims Edison himself was "killing cats and dogs by luring them onto a metal plate wired to a 1,000 volt AC generator". It also later states that "Edison himself offered a bounty of 25 cents for every animal caught and delivered for the experiments".

Myths and Mysteries of New Jersey: True Stories of the Unsolved and Unexplained likewise claims that he himself "purchased stray cats and dogs from local schoolboys for 25 cents each". In addition, it claims that animals used were (ironically) initially provided by the ASPCA, before they were aware of his plans. While it also claims many of these were actually conducted by Brown, it clearly states Edison was orchestating the whole thing.

Neither of these, however, make any mention of Edison using people's pets. In addition, the Wikipedia page for Brown claims that "Brown would continually claim he had no actual association with Edison". My question here is therefore twofold:

Is there any proof that Edison (or someone else on his behalf) kidnapped people's pets for use in his (cruel) demonstrations?

How many of these public executions of animals were actually conducted by Edison himself, in person? While it's clear that Edison was supporting (financially and via other means) and in many cases even initiating these, I got the idea (which I failed to either prove or disprove) he was trying not to personally get involved in these (possibly as to avoid the reputation that goes with killing innocent animals).

• thomas-edison

• Your image doesn't actually claim that Edison paid people to kidnap peoples' pets; it just seems that way due to the juxtaposition of the two (claimed) facts. (although, I imagine the image means for you to draw that conclusion yourself despite not claiming it outright) You might want to clarify whether you're specifically asking about Edison paying for kidnapping, or whether you're asking about the other facts. –  user27389 Commented Nov 15, 2016 at 12:19
• 1 I really see no other way to interpret this; "people's pets disappearing near Edison's laboratory" followed by "Edison was paying to have animals kidnapped", especially in the context of an article about Edison (well, Tesla, but large parts of it are related to Edison), seems quite clear to me. Or am I missing something here? Either way, my questions are whether people's pets were kidnapped and then electrocuted by Edison or on his behalf and whether it was publicly known at the time that Edison was behind most of these demonstrations. –  fstanis Commented Nov 15, 2016 at 13:29
• Note your other sources are also along these lines: "bounty .. for every animal caught ", "purchased stray cats and dogs". The obvious alternative to consider is that, rather than conspiring to kidnap pets, Edison did exactly what these quotes claimed, and that whatever pet disappearances happened were for other reasons. (e.g. coincidence, or kids being the rapscallions they are, decided that strays were too hard to catch and kidnapped the domestic variety instead, and sold them pretending they were strays) –  user27389 Commented Nov 15, 2016 at 13:38
• Sure, that makes sense, that's why I became skeptical in the first place of the claim by Oatmeal (the one of disappearing pets) and was wondering whether it's backed by anything or was it just to make his point more dramatic. –  fstanis Commented Nov 15, 2016 at 13:58
• 1 The wikipedia page on Topsy states that this incident was 10 years after the "War of the Currents" –  JimmyJames Commented Nov 21, 2016 at 18:04

2 Answers 2

According to Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography , 1959, page 347

There, on any day in 1887, one might have found Edison and his assistants occupied in certain cruel and lugubrious experiments: the electrocution of stray cats and dogs...The feline and canine pets of the West Orange neighborhood were purchased from eager schoolboys at twenty-five cents each and executed in such numbers that the local animal population stood in danger of being decimated

Also, according to Thomas A. Edison: A Modern Olympian (1934) by May Childs Nerney:

[quoting Edison] "...to seek practical demonstration in support of such facts as have been developed and I have taken life - not human life - in the belief and full consciousness that the end justified the means."

Taking life was demonstrated in the Laboratory yard at Orange, which witnessed several massacres of innocents ... With a price of twenty-five cents on their heads not a pet pussy in the Oranges was safe from marauding boys, who lined up daily at the Laboratory gate with victims for the god Experiment. The strange resistance of cats, however, to the electric current made them less satisfactory subjects than dogs, which also had a price on their heads.

May Childs Nerney was hired by Edison Laboratory as secretary of historical research and had access to the lab's papers. This is a 1934 New York Times review of her book.

An earlier reference on this topic is the court record of People of the State of New York against William Kemmler (1889):

A. Dogs were found in the town : the boys brought them.

Q. Did the boys bring them in the interest of science , or for 50 cents apiece ?

A. The boys brought them for 25 cents apiece

Q. What was the object of them ?

A. The object was to gain information as to what kind of a current would kill a human being .

Q. How did you come to be interested in that ?

A. Because it was the World reporter, as far as I know. Mr. Edison can tell better than I can about that.

Q. Do you mean to say that Mr. Edison , as a rule , will furnish dogs at 25 cents a head and send out purveyors to get old horses - horses of some age - and bring them in for the purpose of experimenting as a courtesy to wayfaring experimentalists?

A. Mr. Edison did that in this case.

• 1 @IMSoP According to the New York Times, the author of the 1934 book had access to the laboratory papers: nytimes.com/1934/03/25/archives/… –  DavePhD Commented Jan 12, 2023 at 14:43
• @IMSoP she was "secretary of historical research at the Thomas A. Edison Laboratory in West Orange" digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu/items/show/4630 –  DavePhD Commented Jan 12, 2023 at 14:48
• @IMSoP I added a 1889 reference too. –  DavePhD Commented Jan 12, 2023 at 18:25
• 1 That's a fantastic find! –  IMSoP Commented Jan 12, 2023 at 18:42

I have not been able to read the full text of the source quoted in DavePhD's answer. However, using Google Books page views, I did try to locate the sources cited for the relevant section of Matthew Josephson 's biography:

541: Dickson, Life and Inventions of Edison, p. 330 .

This is the citation for the paragraph preceding the one quoted in DavePhD's answer. It supports the statements made in that paragraph, which pertain to experiments in the electrocution of animals, but doesn't cover the topic of whether pets were kidnapped for these experiments.

Therefore, if there are sources supporting the statements in the paragraph included in DavePhD's answer, I would expect them to be found in the immediately following citations. Josephson's next two numbered citations are as follows:

542: Francis G. Leupp, George Westinghouse (New York, 1918), pp. 133, 145 ff .

I did not find this exact printing of this book, but here is a scan of the same book as published in Boston in 1919: page 131 , the first page of the chapter "The Contest of the Currents". I see information here about electrocution of dogs, but not information about whether any animals were involved that were pets.

543: T. A. Edison, "Dangers of Electric Lighting", North American Review, November, 1889.

Available on JSTOR .

Edison states "I have myself seen a large healthy dog killed instantly by the alternating current at a pressure of one hundred and sixty eight volts" (page 631) but does not as far as I can tell confess here to offering 25-cent bounties for animals.

Based on the location of the paragraph, I'm guessing there is no other source explicitly cited in Josephson's biography to support the statement that "feline and canine pets of the West Orange neighborhood were purchased from eager schoolboys at twenty-five cents each".

However, DavePhD has edited the answer to add additional sources that do support this statement.

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Cat experiments stopped at US Department of Veterans Affairs

by Scott Taylor

WASHINGTON (7News) — In a historic move, WJLA learned that scheduled cat experiments inside the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) will no longer occur.

Research has been halted including implanting experimental medical devices in seven cats' backs and legs.

RELATED | Deadly kitten experiments funded by NIH at UC-Davis halted after White Coat inquiry

White Coat Waste Project , a D.C.-based tax payer's watchdog group, has been pushing to end these types of animal experiments for years.

"This is a monumental moment because this marks the complete end to dog and cat testing at the VA. This is the first federal agency that has completely eliminated dog and cat testing and now we are hoping we can get other agencies and get Congress to follow suit and do it elsewhere," says Justin Goodman with White Coat Waste Project.

The news comes after White Coat and WJLA in May exposed planned cat experiments in California at UC-Davis and funded by NIH. Those experiments have also been halted.

The new cat research at the VA was approved in 2022. Set to begin this year at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

U.S. Representative Nicole Malliotakis of New York, co-chair of the Congressional Animal Protection Caucus, pushed to end the VA experiments.

I think taxpayers would be very upset to know their money is being used not on just unnecessary experiments but on inhumane ones that really torture these poor innocent animals," added U.S. Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY).

Last year, Congresswoman Dina Titus along with U.S. Representative Brian Mast (R-FL) wrote to the VA and discovered it was planning on spending $50,000 of its tax dollars on the cat experiments.

"Now the clock has moved on and there is new technology. There is bipartisan support. There's more public knowledge about the issue. So we are starting to see some progress made," said U.S. Representative Dina Titus (D-NV) .

In another historic move, Congress has enacted legislation to eliminate all tests on cats, dogs, and primates at the VA by 2026. Congressman Ken Calvert, a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, helped make that happen and many in Congress support alternative testing including using microchips that mimic human organs.

There are a number of federal agencies that continue to do this so we need to make sure every agency uses these alternative methods to protect animals and as I said early to protect the taxpayer," says U.S. Representative Ken Calvert (R-CA) .

As recently as April, the cat experiment was listed on the VA’s animal research website under current research. White Coat noticed the project was suddenly removed from the VA website and 7News started asking questions.

The VA told WJLA:

"There is no feline testing happening at this facility or any other. Historically, VA has conducted research using sensitive species only when absolutely necessary to care for those who have served in our military. Over the last 19 years, VA has proactively reduced the number of studies involving sensitive species – driving an over 90% decrease in these types of studies. Under Secretary McDonough’s leadership, this practice is now coming to an end. This year’s Consolidated Appropriations Act included a provision that eliminated testing on sensitive species at VA within two years, with limited exceptions, and VA is fully complying with the law."

Terrence Hayes

VA Press Secretary

"It's really a win-win for everyone from animals to Americans to scientists. Ending animal testing. Ending this wasteful animal testing," said Goodman.

This isn't a first for Goodman and White Coat. Two years ago, it helped end dog experiments for good here at the VA.

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Cringy moves and a white b-girl’s durag prompt questions about Olympic breaking’s authenticity

Australia’s Rachael Gunn, known as B-Girl Raygun, competes during the Round Robin Battle at the breaking competition at La Concorde Urban Park at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Friday, Aug. 9, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin)

Australia’s Rachael Gunn, known as B-Girl Raygun, competes during the Round Robin Battle at the breaking competition at La Concorde Urban Park at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Friday, Aug. 9, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr)

Lithuania’s Dominika Banevic, known as B-Girl Nicka, competes during the B-Girls quarterfinals at the breaking competition at La Concorde Urban Park at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Friday, Aug. 9, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin)

American artist Snoop Dogg stands on stage prior to the breaking competition at La Concorde Urban Park at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Friday, Aug. 9, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin)

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PARIS (AP) — From the Australian b-girl with the meme-worthy “kangaroo” dance move to the silver-medal winning Lithuanian in a durag, breaking’s Olympic debut had a few moments that raised questions from viewers about whether the essence of the hip-hop art form was captured at the Paris Games.

Rachael Gunn, or “b-girl Raygun,” a 36-year-old professor from Sydney, Australia, quickly achieved internet fame, but not necessarily for Olympic-level skill. Competing against some b-girls half her age, she was swept out of the round-robin stage without earning a single point, and her unconventional moves landed flat while failing to match the skill level of her foes.

At one point, Gunn raised one leg while standing and leaned back with her arms bent toward her ears. At another, while laying on her side, she reached for her toes, flipped over and did it again in a move dubbed “the kangaroo.”

B-Girl Raygun competes during the Round Robin Battle on Friday, Aug. 9, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr)

Gunn has a Ph.D. in cultural studies, and her LinkedIn page notes she is “interested in the cultural politics of breaking.”

“I was never going to beat these girls on what they do best — their power moves,” said Gunn. “What I bring is creativity.”

Clips of her routine have gone viral on TikTok and elsewhere, and many cringed at her moves platformed on the Olympic stage as a representation of hip-hop and breaking culture.

“It’s almost like they are mocking the genre,” wrote one user on X.

Some of it was ‘weird to see’

Many Black viewers, in particular, called out Lithuania’s silver medalist b-girl Nicka, (legally named Dominika Banevič) for donning a durag during each of her battles. Durags, once worn by enslaved Africans to tie up their hair for work, are still worn by Black people to protect and style their hair. They became a fashionable symbol of Black pride in the 1960s and 1970s and, in the 1990s and early 2000s, also became a popular element of hip-hop style. But when worn by those who aren’t Black, durags can be seen as cultural appropriation. Banevič is white.

Lithuania’s Dominika Banevic, known as B-Girl Nicka, competes during the B-Girls quarterfinals. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin)

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Actor Kevin Fredericks responded on Instagram to Banevič donning the headwear by saying it looked “weird to see somebody who don’t need it for protective style or waves to be rocking the durag.”

The 17-year-old breaker ultimately won the silver medal after losing in the final to Japan’s b-girl Ami (Ami Yuasa).

For her part, Banevič has credited the breakers from the 1970s in the Bronx — the OGs — or “original gangsters” in hip-hop who created the dance — for her own success and breaking style.

“It’s a huge responsibility to represent and raise the bar every time for breaking because they did an amazing job. Big respect for the OGs and the pioneers that invented all those moves. Without them, it wouldn’t be possible,” she said. “Without them, breaking wouldn’t be where it is today. So I’m grateful for them.”

Concerns over losing breaking’s roots

Friday night’s slips “may have alienated too many new viewers to garner the anticipated response from our Olympic premiere,” said Zack Slusser, vice president of Breaking for Gold USA and USA Dance, in a text message to the Associated Press.

“We need to change the narrative from yesterday’s first impression of breaking as Olympic sport. There were significant organizational and governance shortcomings that could have been easily reconciled but, unfortunately, negatively impacted Breaking’s first touching point to a new global audience.”

The challenge for Olympic organizers was to bring breaking and hip-hop culture to a mass audience, including many viewers who were skeptical about the dance form’s addition to the Olympic roster. Others feared the subculture being co-opted by officials, commercialized and put through a rigid judging structure, when the spirit of breaking has been rooted in local communities, centered around street battles, cyphers and block parties. Hip-hop was born as a youth culture within Black and brown communities in the Bronx as a way to escape strife and socio-economic struggles and make a statement of empowerment at a time when they were labeled as lost, lawless kids by New York politicians.

Refugee breaker Manizha Talash, or “b-girl Talash,” channeled that rebellious vibe by donning a “Free Afghan Women” cape during her pre-qualifier battle — a defiant and personal statement for a 21-year-old who fled her native Afghanistan to escape Taliban rule. Talash was quickly disqualified for violating the Olympics’ ban on political statements on the field of play.

Refugee Team’s Manizha Talash, known as Talash wears a cape which reads “free Afghan women.” (AP Photo/Frank Franklin)

Both American b-girls were eliminated in Friday’s round-robin phase, a blow to the country representing the birthplace of hip-hop in what could be the discipline’s only Games appearance. B-girl Logistx (legal name Logan Edra) and b-girl Sunny (Sunny Choi) both ranked in the top 12 internationally but came up short of the quarterfinals.

“Breaking for the Olympics has changed the way that some people are dancing,” said Choi, referring to some of the flashier moves and jam-packed routines. “Breaking changes over time. And maybe I’m just old-school and I don’t want to change. ... I think a lot of people in our community were a little bit afraid of that happening.”

The b-boys take the stage on Saturday to give Olympic breaking another chance at representing the culture.

Associated Press Race & Ethnicity Editor Aaron Morrison contributed to this report from New York.

AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games

The Australian Olympian 'Raygun' went viral for her breaking moves. Now she's defending them.

• Rachael Gunn, known as "Raygun," is an Australian B-girl (break-girl) who competed at the Olympics .
• She lost three battles in the round-robin part of the competition, but her moves went viral online.
• Gunn and sporting organizations are speaking out about harassment and misinformation after her performance.

Breaking made its debut at the 2024 Paris Olympics — and while she didn't earn a spot on the podium, the Australian breaker Rachael Gunn, known as Raygun, has received plenty of recognition online.

Gunn is a 36-year-old lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney whose research focuses on the "cultural politics of breaking," according to her faculty profile .

But Gunn's time on the Olympic stage was short-lived. The B-girl was eliminated during the round-robin stage of the women's breaking competition, losing in one-on-one battles to the United States' Logistx, France's Syssy, and Lithuania's Nicka.

Raygun didn't earn a point in any of those battles, but as clips of her performance spread online, she got something else: instant meme status.

Here's what you need to know about Raygun now that the breaking competition is over.

Raygun is an academic who studies breaking — and she competes internationally

Before Gunn went to the Olympics, she approached the 2024 Games from an academic perspective.

With her coauthor, Lucas Marie, Gunn published an article in the June 2023 issue of Global Hip Hop Studies titled "The Australian breaking scene and the Olympic Games: The possibilities and politics of sportification." The article examined how the Olympics' institutionalization would affect the Australian breaking scene.

Alongside her academic career, Gunn is a competing B-girl. But before she got into breaking, she had experience with ballroom dancing, jazz, hip-hop, salsa, and tap, The Australian Women's Weekly reported. Gunn told The Sydney Morning Herald that her husband, Samuel Free, introduced her to breaking in 2008 while they were at university. Free is still her coach, she said.

Gunn told Women's Weekly that breaking "hooked" her in 2012, around the time that she began her doctoral program in cultural studies. She began competing more seriously in 2018 and eventually set her sights on the Olympics.

According to her university profile, she was the top-ranked B-girl of the Australian Breaking Association in 2020 and 2021, representing the country at the World DanceSport Federation Breaking Championships in 2021, 2022, and 2023. She also won the WDSF Oceania Breaking Championships in 2023.

"My bag always has two main things: It's like, my knee pads and my laptop," Gunn said on the podcast " The Female Athlete Project ." "Because I need my knee-pads to break. And then, yeah, just do some emails quickly. Or like, do some revisions on a chapter I submitted, or copyedit this article I did, or moderate those grades."

The athlete also told the Herald that she preferred to wear "baggy jeans and a baggy T-shirt" while breaking.

"I like the heaviness they bring," Gunn said. "Maybe it's my background in hip-hop, but having weight closer to the ground works for me, gets me in the right headspace."

Raygun's performances at the Olympics sparked memes and criticism

Raygun took the stage at the Olympics wearing a tracksuit in Australia's green and gold, breaking out moves that included hopping like a kangaroo. Her performances attracted attention online and memes that compared her moves to, among other things, dancing children.

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The fact that RayGun has a Ph.D in breakdancing is its own commentary on academia vs real world expertise. https://t.co/pQcL8HzAW9 — BioTechSnack (@SnackBioTech) August 9, 2024

me forcing my mom to watch the dance i made up in the pool pic.twitter.com/zbtwEFjpTG — kenzi (@kenzianidiot) August 9, 2024

Judges made the right call here because what was that move lol #Olympics #Breakdancing pic.twitter.com/sXAs9AdHjX — MⓞNK BLOODY P👑s (@MonkeyBlood) August 9, 2024

But some critics argued that Raygun's performance didn't represent breaking — a sport that will not return to the 2028 Games in Los Angeles.

Breaking came from Black and brown communities in the Bronx in the 1970s. Malik Dixon, an African American man who lives in Australia, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that Gunn came off as "somebody who was toying with the culture" during a significant moment for the sport.

(You can watch the 2024 Olympic events — including Raygun's full performance — on Peacock.)

Raygun qualified for the Olympics through the Oceania Breaking Championships

There were three ways to qualify for breaking at the Olympics, which the World Dance Sport Federation (WDSF) outlined in April 2022: at the WDSF championship in Belgium in September 2023, in a continental qualifier, or in an Olympic qualifier series held in 2024. Gunn qualified regionally by winning the WDSF Oceania Breaking Championships, which were held in Sydney in October 2023.

AUSBreaking organized the Oceania Breaking Championships, according to the WDSF .

AUSBreaking posted on Instagram about the Oceanic Olympic qualifying event on Instagram in September 2023, announcing in a September 25, 2023 post that competitor registration was open. The panel of judges was composed of 10 breakers from multiple countries, led by head judge Katsu One of Japan.

Per the Sydney Morning Herald, Gunn was the highest-scoring B-girl on day one of the championships. She won two battles on the second day to secure her title and a qualifying spot in the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.

AUSBreaking released a statement on Instagram Monday about the selection process, saying that the qualifying event was "open to all interested participants in the Oceanic region," conducted in line with WDSF standards, and adjudicated by an international panel that used the same judging system as the 2024 Olympics.

"Ultimately, Rachael Gunn and Jeff Dunne emerged as the top performers in exactly the same process, securing their spots to represent Australia in Paris," the statement reads. "Their selection was based solely on their performance in their battles on that day."

Raygun and sporting organizations have spoken out about misinformation after her performance

Claims have circulated online that Gunn unfairly obtained her spot in the games. Posts online, as reported by the Australian Associated Press , claimed that Gunn's husband was one of the judges in her qualifying event. One petition hosted on Change.org claimed that she established the governing body that ran the selection process. That petition was eventually removed after it was placed under review, per an archived snapshot .

A representative for Change.org confirmed to Business Insider on Thursday that the petition had been flagged for misinformation, reviewed per the platform's community guidelines, and removed from the platform.

"Change.org maintains strict guidelines against content that constitutes harassment, bullying, or spreading false information. We take such matters seriously and remove any content that violates these standards to protect our users and uphold the integrity of our community," the rep said in an email statement to BI.

Despite the online claims, Free was not one of the judges at Gunn's qualifying event. And Gunn did not establish AUSBreaking. The organization said in a statement that it was founded by its president Lowe Napalan in 2019, and "at no point" was Gunn "the founder, an executive, committee member, or in any position of leadership."

The Australian Olympic Commission (AOC) also released a statement condemning the Change.org petition, and demanding its removal. It also said that by winning the Oceania championship, Gunn was "legitimately nominated" by DanceSport Australia to the AOC to represent Australia at the Olympics.

"The petition has stirred up public hatred without any factual basis. It's appalling," AOC chief executive officer Matt Carroll said in the statement. "No athlete who has represented their country at the Olympic Games should be treated in this way and we are supporting Dr. Gunn and Anna Meares at this time."

In a video uploaded to her personal Instagram account, Gunn said that she was "honored" to have represented Australia and breaking during its Olympic debut. But the "hate" that followed was "devastating," she said. When it came to misinformation around her qualification, Gunn referred viewers to previously issued statements from the AOC and AUSBreaking.

Raygun and breaking judges have defended her Olympic performance

At a press conference on Saturday, the day after Gunn's competition, Anna Meares, the head of the Australian team, responded to criticism of Gunn online.

"I love Rachael, and I think that what has occurred on social media with trolls and keyboard warriors, and taking those comments and giving them airtime, has been really disappointing," Meares said, per ESPN .

"Raygun is an absolutely loved member of this Olympic team. She has represented the Olympic team, the Olympic spirit with great enthusiasm. And I absolutely love her courage," Meares continued. "I love her character, and I feel very disappointed for her, that she has come under the attack that she has."

During a press conference on Sunday, Martin Gilian, the Olympic breaking head judge, defended Gunn's performance, saying breaking was "all about originality" and representing your roots, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.

"This is exactly what Raygun was doing," Gilian said. "She got inspired by her surroundings, which in this case, for example, was a kangaroo."

Gunn said during the Saturday press conference that "all of my moves are original," ESPN reported. She told The Guardian that her biggest strength was "creativity."

"I was never going to beat these girls on what they do best, the dynamic and the power moves, so I wanted to move differently, be artistic and creative," Gunn told The Guardian, "because how many chances do you get that in a lifetime to do that on an international stage. I was always the underdog and wanted to make my mark in a different way."

This story was originally published on August 12, 2024, and has been updated to include the latest information and statements from those involved.

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