Well-being at the cost of welfare: Learned helplessness and responsibility in positive psychology and American policy

In this article I trace the connected histories of well-being and welfare within contemporary American social science and policy. Focusing on the postwar concept of learned helplessness and its associated notions like hopelessness, industriousness, and laziness, I trace a genealogy that is part of the story of the rise of positive psychology, as well as the disciplinary and cultural shift toward self-control, self-monitoring, and other aspects of a moral self-governance founded on values of responsibility and persistence in pursuing personal well-being. Springing from animal research on rats, dogs, and pigeons, then swiftly toward human subjects such as sufferers of depression, students, and welfare recipients, the trajectory from helplessness and hopelessness toward responsibility and persistence followed and possibly influenced both attitudes toward welfarism and changes in American welfare policies. From Curt Richter’s work on hopeless rats to Martin Seligman and colleagues’ decades-spanning work that culminated in positive psychology (part of the wider happiness studies and science of well-being movements), psychological research is framed within the wider history of American welfare. Coinciding with a growing disciplinary inclination toward individual self-improvement that valued personal responsibility and persistence as key virtues, welfare was continually reformed and dismantled under the same principles.