This isn’t the first time I’ve written about learned helplessness and the Pygmalion effect: two psychological mechanisms we could be falling victim to without knowing it. Looking back, they might answer some of the questions we ask ourselves today when we notice that we lack the courage for certain things.
The Pygmalion effect can be used to condition a child or an adult, either positively or negatively, as psychologist Wendell Johnson showed in what became known as the “Monster Study”. I hope you can draw positive conclusions from this, and if you’ve fallen into learned helplessness, that you find the courage to break out of the imaginary cage we sometimes end up in.
Featured image: Vinoth Chandar from Chennai, India, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
