I remember thinking it was ironic how in the Wikipedia article on learned helpnessness when they talk about the dogs the tone is like “oh, how sad, these dogs are so demoralized that they don’t even try to escape their own suffering”, but when it came to humans it was like “oh look, these humans seem to have a choice about whether or not they suffer but they’re acting as if they don’t have that choice so as to avoid blame and avoid putting forth effort to change their situation”; which if taken seriously sort of undermines the hypothesis about how the behavioral mechanisms are largely the same for both animals. But you could tell it was totally unconscious on the part of the writers, and if you’d tried to point it out to them they could just backpedal in various ways, and so there’d be no point in trying to point out the change in perspective, it’d just look like defensiveness. And going meta like this probably wouldn’t help either.
I remember thinking it was ironic how in the Wikipedia article on learned helpnessness when they talk about the dogs the tone is like “oh, how sad, these dogs are so demoralized that they don’t even try to escape their own suffering”, but when it came to humans it was like “oh look, these humans seem to have a choice about whether or not they suffer but they’re acting as if they don’t have that choice so as to avoid blame and avoid putting forth effort to change their situation”; which if taken seriously sort of undermines the hypothesis about how the behavioral mechanisms are largely the same for both animals. But you could tell it was totally unconscious on the part of the writers, and if you’d tried to point it out to them they could just backpedal in various ways, and so there’d be no point in trying to point out the change in perspective, it’d just look like defensiveness. And going meta like this probably wouldn’t help either.