Powerlessness and Knowledge: A Comparative Study of Alienation and Learning (1967)

This study, conducted in Sweden, replicates and extends work done in the U.S. on alienation and learning. The major hypothesis is that those who are high in powerlessness will have inferior knowledge in control-relevant areas of their experience. Two knowledge tests were constructed (concerning nuclear and cultural affairs); and it is shown that high powerlessness goes with poor nuclear knowledge, while alienated and unalienated students do not differ in cultural information. Thus, the powerlessness-learning hypothesis applies cross-culturally, and applies to a wide range of control-relevant information (e.g., nuclear war, reformatory life, and health). But, as the pertinent theory requires, (1) there are predictable limits to the learning effect, and (2) it is not attributable to personality or intellectual capacity. An effort is also made to test the hypothesis that the sense of powerlessness leads to behavioral avoidance when the individual’s anxieties about control are invoked.