verging_on_random

Learned helplessness

September 11, 2006 on 4:43 pm | In Uncategorized |

Psychologists use this concept of ‘learned helplessness’ to describe a condition where someone has come to depend so completely on another that they are incapable of exercising their own initiative. We’ve co-opted the expression in organisational behaviour studies (one day I must write about the extent to which OB and management studies generally depend on concepts borrowed from other disciplines).

Anyway we discuss the way people working in bureaucracies often become lost and helpless when confronted by a situation that’s not covered by the rules. Usually they will simply wait passively until somebody in authority comes along and tells them what to do.

I was reminded of this the other night when I watched a show about people’s behaviour in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina last year. In the Superdome about 20,000 people seem to have passively waited for ‘the authorities’ to come and do something, while in the mean time social order broke down completely. To take an especially gross example, people kept using the toilets until they were too disgusting to even go through the door, and then started using any other place they could find.

Apparently nobody thought to organise a cleaning detail, or arrange even a basic volunteer roster to maintain some kind of social order. Or if someone did try it obviously didn’t work. Nope, people just lapsed into dysfunctional behaviour waiting for the cleaners to turn up.

It’s a worrying thought that this kind of learned helplessness is fairly typical of modern cities. The response to any problem is to call on the government to do something about it, by passing some new laws or employing some more police/inspectors/judges or both. Our problems fall into two categories: ones we can solve by buying goods or services and ones that are the government’s problem. Nothing is our collective responsibility any more.
Margaret Thatcher once said that “There is no such thing as society, just a collection of individuals” and that appears to be an emerging reality. Which is a scary development when the most important issues of the next few decades will be ones that can only be addressed effectively at a social level. If we leave everything to governments, the result will be an ever-increasing level of authoritarian interference in our lives.

And the even bigger problem is that authoritarian solutions are rarely effective, meaning that unless we learn as communities to take responsibility for our own destinies the social problems (such as water management) will just keep getting worse. I will not, however, hold my breath waiting for a change to happen.