Learned Helplessness and The Outrage Button

A rabbit hole that gets more depressing the further down you go

So, take a rat. Put him—lab rats are typically male, but more about that later—in a cage. Start randomly shocking the floor, and give him no possibility of escape. Get the rat all good and stressed, then give him a break.

After the rat’s well-deserved break, put him back in the shock-y cage, start randomly shocking the floor again, but this time give him a possibility of escape to a shock-free cage.

He (usually) won’t take it. He’ll stay in the cage that shocks him.

“Despite all my rage…”

The concept is called Learned Helplessness, and I learned it from my therapist a few months ago. The simplest take-away from this experiment is this: if you chronically experience stress that is uncontrollable and inescapable, you give up. You no longer try to escape, even after being given a clear avenue for escape.

It’s an experiment used to understand depression, and the feelings of helplessness that depression arouses. The idea touches a lot of other situations: addiction, poverty, abusive relationships, homelessness. If you’ve been taught that your actions make no difference, then why bother trying to escape?

It’s a useful idea, and it makes practical sense to me. You see the results of it every day.

Jump cut to my email inbox today.

Quora.com sends me questions daily. They make sure I can see the subject line before I click. I usually don’t. But for about a week now, they’ve been sending me questions asked by Trump-leaning posters, and the questions are pretty simple-minded and triggering (“Are liberals so stupid that they don’t see our cities are burning because yadayadayada…?”) and if you click on the email, you’ll see an answer that is equally simple-minded and triggering, but pointed in the opposite direction (”Only sheep who watch Fox News believe our cities are burning because yadayadayada…?”). I clicked on them for a week. Because the original posts were so outrageously misguided, and the responses so obviously correct, I had to read on.

It’s The Outrage Button. The easiest way to get me to click is to make me feel outraged (and then, right afterward, superior). Even after I learned their trick, I clicked a few more times, because the outrage/superiority cycle felt so satisfying.

I no longer click on them. I’m pretty sure I’ll keep getting them. It will take awhile for the algorithm to learn.

It’s a wildly common strategy. I get several emails a day from NextDoor.com. They’re dumpster-fire-level unhinged (so unhinged I wrote a story about them, GoodNeighbor.com). Most of them, or at least the ones they send me, involve Ring cameras and my neighbors video-ing people as they walk down the street looking at yards and assuming they are scouting the area for crime (I am one of those people who walk down these streets looking at yards, daily, and I promise I am not scouting the area for crime).

I know enough of my neighbors to know most don’t look at me and think he’s a thief! when I’m walking the neighborhood. But Nextdoor.com creates the illusion that my neighbors are distrustful of me, because those are the posts they push out to me.

I subscribe to a bunch of weird newsletters, from all political stripes, but my favorite from the far right is The Epoch Times. Once a day I get an alternative news headline. The headline is in the subject line (“CDC Links Covid to Biblical Disease”) and I never get to read the article because I’m not a subscriber. But the headlines are obvious Outrage Buttons for the newsletter’s subscribers, and pique my interest as well, as the algorithms at the Epoch times clearly know, because they’ve seen me click. (The Biblical disease is leprosy, incidentally.)

All three of these organizations are trying to instill a sense of learned helplessness in me. Quora.com tells me Republicans are idiots, incapable of change. NextDoor.com presents a world of porch pirates running rampant, unchecked by law. The Epoch Times shows me a corrupt government, intent on destroying America (they are particularly peeved at the CDC).

Okay. So far, so good. Our institutions are creating a sense of Leaned Helplessness in all of us. It’s not a stunning realization to understand the media at large is trying to get me to engage by making me feel outraged. They may have been an epiphany back in 2016, but in 2023 it’s old news.

My true epiphany came today when I was researching Learned Helplessness. You can buy Learned Helplessness machines! There is a site that sells the whole set-up, the two cages, the shock mechanism, everything. All you have to do is put a rat inside and plug it in.

From the website: The…Set-Up for Learned Helplessness is based on a sophisticated generator of unpredictable random shocks delivered to the grid floor of a rodent box where no escape is possible. Electric shocks can be randomized in terms of shock length, interval and complex trains can be programmed.

From that came the understanding that the algorithms shaping our lives are just Learned Helplessness Machines that somebody bought online. I doubt these places program their own algorithms. You can easily buy the software online. Our culture has created the ability to buy software that creates a sense of Learned Helplessness tailored to every individual, based on their own unique sets of behaviors whenever they click. You can literally buy a pre-made kit to do this for you.

Our electronic culture is a giant Learned Helplessness machine. There’s no way to escape the shock. Sit down, make yourself comfortable. Nothing is ever going to get any better.

I’m a relatively hopeful guy, I don’t fully believe that. I do think lots of people are attempting to sell that belief to me, in order to get me to vote a certain way, or buy a certain product, or click a certain link. Hope is an increasingly rare commodity, and I don’t see many institutions pushing it. Hope doesn’t sell.

But maybe I don’t see it because I click on the wrong buttons.

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Just when you though this couldn’t get any more depressing, I followed the Learned Helplessness rabbit hole down far enough to wonder what gender the lab rats were. I found out that researchers almost always used male rats (or used to, anyway), because “male rats are more reliable for getting data as they aren't as hormonal as females” (I’m guessing these researchers have never been to a football game).

Same rabbit hole: male researchers in the lab make rats more nervous. Add to that: most researchers are male.

So. Male rats, male researchers, and males all over the place making everyone more jumpy. I’ll try to avoid being overly sexist in my next statement, but the whole experiment looks a little shady to me. An experiment designed and implemented by men, tested on male rats, and always performed with a bunch of males in the room to skew the data. The entire setup is awash in male hormones.

If women had designed this test, and administered it, and used female rats, would the result have been different?

Would our algorithms be leading us toward nurturing and community?

I don’t know, I’m just asking the question.

Peace.