LEARNED HELPLESSNESS AND SUPERSTITIOUS BEHAVIOR: A STUDY OF THE EFFECTS OF CONTIGUITY AND CONTINGENCY

Abstract

Response-independent environmental events have produced different results in humans: some studies reveal the development of superstitious behavior while others report learned helplessness. This research investigated the role of the time interval between the presentation of a stimulus and the subjects’ responses in producing these effects. Four groups of participants (n = 10) were exposed to two phases. In the first phase, an aversive auditory stimulus was presented and the response-contingent group could escape from it, while the yoked response-noncontingent group could not. The response-noncontingent group was exposed to inescapable sounds of 5s in all the trials, while the delayed response-contingent group could avoid the sounds. However, this avoiding response triggered a delay, which, in the response-contingent group, was determined by the time interval between the end of the stimulus and the prior response. The control group (n = 10) was given only to the second phase, in which all the participants could turn off the sounds. The results indicate that the time interval between the environmental event and the prior response seems to play an important role both in the selection and maintenance of the behavior in the first phase and in the production of learned helplessness in the second phase.Keywords: contiguity, contingency, superstitious behavior, learned helplessness.