An analysis of learned helplessness: II. The processing of success

Helpless children attribute their failures to lack of ability and view them as insurmountable. Mastery-oriented children, in contrast, tend to emphasize mo-tivational factors and to view failure as surmountable. Although the performance of the two groups is usually identical during success or prior to failure, past re-search suggests that these groups may well differ in the degree to which they perceive that their successes are replicable and hence that their failures are avoidable. The present study was concerned with the nature of such differences. Children performed a task on which they encountered success and then failure. Half were asked a series of questions about their performance after success and half after failure. Striking differences emerged: Compared to mastery-oriented children, helpless children underestimated the number of successes (and over-estimated the number of failures), did not view successes as indicative of ability, and did not expect the successes to continue. Subsequent failure led them to devalue their performance but left the mastery-oriented children undaunted. Thus, for helpless children, successes are less salient, less predictive, and less enduring—less successful. When individuals view their actions as ir-relevant to subsequent outcomes, they may be said to display "learned helplessness " (see Seligman, Maier, & Geer, 1968). Such beliefs about control over outcomes have been found to be important determinants of behavior in achievement situations. For example, per-ceiving that one is unable to surmount failure can have highly debilitating effects on per-formance, as seen in studies on learned help-lessness (Diener & Dweck, 1978; Dweck, 1975; Dweck & Bush, 1976; Dweck & Rep-pucci, 1973). In contrast, perceiving that one is able to avoid or to escape from failure can have facilitating effects (Diener & Dweck, This study is based on a dissertation submitted b