HUMAN REACTIONS TO UNCONTROLLABLE OUTCOMES - FURTHER EVIDENCE FOR SUPERSTITIONS RATHER THAN HELPLESSNESS

Recent research has shown superstitious behaviour and illusion of cont rol in human subjects exposed to the negative reinforcement conditions that are traditionally assumed to lead to the opposite outcome (i.e. learned helplessness). The experiments reported in this paper test the generality of these effects in two different tasks and under differen t conditions of percentage (75% vs. 25%) and distribution (random vs, last-trials) of negative reinforcement (escape from uncontrollable noi se). All three experiments obtained superstitious behaviour and illusi on of control and question the generality of learned helplessness as a consequence of exposing humans to uncontrollable outcomes.