Interference with judgements of control and learning as a result of prior exposure to controllable and uncontrollable feedback during concept-learning tasks

Two experiments examined whether exposure to an uncontrollable relationship between an action and its outcome during a nonaversive pretreatment phase would attenuate subsequent ratings of control given to actions emitted by s ubjects. In Experiment 1, such an interference effect was demonstrated rela tive to a group that received prior training with a controllable action-out come relationship, and relative to a group not exposed to any prior relatio nship. In Experiment 2, these effects were replicated, and interference was also found to occur when learning a maze task. Thus, the effects of helple ssness were shown to be quite general, to be produced by a nonaversive indu ction procedure, and to occur most readily when the current contingency bet ween action and outcome was weakest.