Some experiences, like some jobs I suppose, can produce a state of learned helplessness. I mean, most often people will flee the kinds of experiences that make one feel helpless. But not always. And as technology becomes ever more central to the way we live, we have to start thinking about not only how a thing functions but how that overall experience system affects people emotionally.
A former boss said to me one day, quite out of the blue, "Don't ever let yourself become institutionalized."
I thought it curious and only had a vague idea what he meant and we didn't discuss it much other than me laughing and saying, "I don't think that's possible with someone like me." Perhaps I should not have been so smugly amused.I had never worked for a very large place… you know… the kind where people say things like, "I'm in so-and-so's org." And where they salt and pepper sentences with acronyms and clichés.
Incidentally (and as a bit of digression), I've always thought of that "lazy" and clichéd communication as an indication of intellectual tiredness or fatigue. I think of it as an alarming symptom even while most people tend to see it as a kind of shorthand and a necessary conversational efficiency. But I think it just might be distracted and tired brains with little energy to fetch and phrase more original things. Mimicry certainly requires less cognitive strain.
Or maybe it is just laziness and stupidity.
Anyway. It really wasn’t until sometime later when I stumbled upon this notion of "learned helplessness" that I realized where my boss was heading with it. "Institutionalized" was a kind of synonym for learned helplessness.
For those not familiar with the concept, "learned helplessness" comes from a series of "classical conditioning" studies done by Martin Seligman. You probably believe that faced with a seriously awful situation you'd do whatever you had to in order to escape it. You could be correct in that belief. It's also entirely possible you'd just curl up in a ball and endure it.
Seligman took one group of dogs, restrained them, rang a bell, and then gave them a mild shock. Sort of like Pavlov conditioning his dogs… only shittier. Yay science.
Now, conditioning complete, the researchers did a second thing. They put the dogs in a box-like contraption divided by a small fence they could see over. They hypothesized that when they rang the bell, the dogs would leap to the other side to avoid the shock they'd been conditioned to expect.
Thing is… they didn't. They just sat there and waited for it. Surely the dogs would jump to the other side once the shock hit. Nope. They just sat there and endured it. Another group of unconditioned dogs behaved as you might expect… meaning they jumped to the other side the minute the shock hit.
The conditioned dogs learned helplessness. In their conditioned brains, the shock couldn't be avoided and therefore it was futile to try to escape it.
If, over the course of your life, you have experienced crushing defeat or pummeling abuse or loss of control, you learn over time there is no escape, and if escape is offered, you will not act – you become a nihilist who trusts futility above optimism.
As you might expect, depression and learned helplessness fit aching hand in scratchy glove.
Health, it seems, is also affected by the degree to which we feel autonomous and capable. People in nursing homes fair significantly better when encouraged to manage more of their activities and given responsibility to do so
The key here is the perception of control and the degree to which we believe that our actions can make a difference. When we feel like we have a choice, we're feeling that learned cause and effect relationship between some self-directed action and some desired result.
When action consistently does nothing … well… that's bad for the body, mind, and soul.
And we should probably be paying attention to this as we design any experience: be it a work environment or a software interface or a product ecosystem. It is quite easy to create experiences that rob people of control and drive them toward learned helplessness.
The cable experience is probably a fairly obvious example. For many, entertainment only came through cable providers. Lots of garbage channels for way too much money. Everything about it was less-than-ideal: from content right on through to service. But we were beat down by a lack of choice and eventually saw it as a necessary evil. We lost optimism and the belief that we could change things for the better. So we gritted our teeth and took the shocks.
Thankfully for the beaten down, incidentally, along came those that were never conditioned to endure the shocks. And they decided that there were better ways to consume entertainment. The minute the shock hit, they jumped the fence. These are your "cord cutters" and "cord-nevers"
It isn't just a large product experience system like a cable offering. Software can do the same thing. There is a fine line between wanting to use MS Office, for instance, and the feeling you have no choice but to use it. It would be unfair to blame Microsoft for that entirely, but you get the idea that a software system can actually burden us emotionally.
To be honest, Apple's closed ecosystem has always troubled me and kept me away because of that tendency to exert excessive control. The desire to simplify people's life, to control the variables and provide a better experience can, in the long run, actually serve to produce a distinctly negative environment. What if I really hate iTunes but really love the iPhone? Clearly, Apple is doing just fine... but will that always be the case and, even if they are, should that be the design of the ecosystem?
In the end, it seems that we have to increasingly think about how technology experiences in their widest sense affect people since they are becoming such a central part of the way we actually live.