Learned Helplessness and Reinforcement Responsibility in Children

In an attempt to demonstrate the effects of low expectancy of reinforcement and low expectancy for control of reinforcement on performance in an achievement situation, 40 fifth-grade children (20 boys and 20 girls) were given successes (soluble block designs) by one adult (success experimenter) and failures (insoluble block designs) by another (failure experimenter) with trials from each being randomly interspersed. A number of children failed to complete problems administered by the failure experimenter when her problems became soluble, even though they had shortly before solved almost identical problems from the success experimenter and continued to perform well on the success experimenter's problems. The subjects who showed the largest performance decrements were those who took less personal responsibility for the outcomes of their actions and who, when they did accept responsibility, attributed success and failure to presence or absence of ability rather than to expenditure of effort. Those subjects who persisted in the face of prolonged failure placed more emphasis on the role of effort in determining the outcome of their behavior; moreover, males displayed this characteristic to a greater extent than did females. Implications of the results for strategies of behavior change are discussed.