Famous Psychology Experiment
These are anagrams. Just do the first one only. Go ahead and solve it. An anagram is rearrange the letters to form a word. Just one. Just rearrange those letters to form a word. When you're done, I need to see your hand raised. Hands
up, please.
Just do number one. Don't go on. Don't go on. This isn't meant to be difficult. Okay, put your hands down. Let's just go to number two. Don't even worry about number one. Go to number two. Solve that one. Again, when you're done, I want to see your hands up.
Everybody's hands down. We're going to go ahead and do number three. For number three, rearrange the letters, and as soon as you do, go ahead and put your hand up.
Here's what you need to know. You were both given two different lists. This side of the room was given two different lists. These three words. The left side of the room, here you go. They were given bat. What would the word be? Bat. The second one, they were given lemon. Brian, the word? Melon. Melon. Very easy.
The trick here was, both of you were given the third word, which was the same. The third word was cinerama, which was? American. American. Your first two words on this side of my classroom. were not solvable. They were impossible tasks. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I know, but here's what we did this for. I was able to induce something called learned helplessness in the left side of the room very easily within about five minutes.
I want you to think about what happened to you, this left side of the room, when you saw the right side of the room raising their hands because they already had the task done. What happened to you during that time? Jory? I felt stupid. You felt stupid? Yeah. Okay. I felt rushed. Felt rushed? Joelle? I was even more confused.
You were even more confused because they all got it and you were still struggling. Chelsea? Frustrated. Frustrated. What happened by the time you got to the third word? Because I'm here to tell you, this side of the room is not significantly more intelligent than this side of the room. That was a random assignment.
So what happened to show the differences? Why did you have more of a difficult time with the third word was the, which was the exact same word, Brian. My confidence was shut. What you experienced was a term called learned helplessness. How many have heard of the term before? I miss your hands. Learned helplessness is often used in the academic literature to mean what?
Jory? Basically, they fail once or can't do something one time and then they apply that to everything in the future.