LEARNED HELPLESSNESS AND SUPERSTITIOUS BEHAVIOR AS OPPOSITE EFFECTS OF UNCONTROLLABLE REINFORCEMENT IN HUMANS

Learned helplessness and superstition accounts of uncontrollability pr edict opposite results for subjects exposed to noncontingent reinforce ment. Experiment 1 used the instrumental-cognitive triadic design prop osed by Hiroto and Seligman (1975) for the testing of learned helpless ness in humans, but eliminated the ''failure light'' that they introdu ced in their procedure. Results showed that Yoked subjects tend to sup erstitious behavior and illusion of control during exposure to uncontr ollable noise. This. in turn, prevents the development of learned help lessness because uncontrollability is not perceived. In Experiment 2, the failure feedback manipulation was added to the Yoked condition. Re sults of this experiment replicate previous findings of a proactive in terference effect in humans-often characterized as learned helplessnes s. This effect, however, does not support learned helplessness theory because failure feedback is needed for its development. It is argued t hat conditions of response-independent reinforcement commonly used in human research do not lead to learned helplessness, but to superstitio us behavior and illusion of control. Different conditions could lead t o learned helplessness, but the limits between superstition and helple ssness have not yet been investigated. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.