I have written before how table tennis involves you being just a few feet away from your opponent. This means that body language is far more telling in this game that it would be in many others. These days, whenever I face a player who regularly beats me, I push that to one side and concentrate on winning the game at hand. However, I often come across players whom I regularly beat. Sometimes they shrug their shoulders as if to say, ‘here we go again’, resigned to the fact that they are not going to win. Of course, this mentality virtually guarantees that they will lose again.

Charisse Nixon is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Penn State University. She describes this state of mind as ‘learned helplessness’, a situation where an individual convinces themselves that they cannot change the outcome of a situation. She devised an experiment to show how quickly this attitude can take hold.

Two groups of students are given anagrams to unscramble, starting with simple ones and moving on to progressively harder ones. The groups are told they have all been given the same words. However, whereas half the students get the progressively harder words as promised, the other half get the most difficult words from the outset.

As the test progresses the students from the difficult half see the other students raise their hands quickly each time they solve a puzzle. In the meantime they themselves cannot find the answers. Not knowing that the test is rigged they begin to assume that they are just no good at this type of problem solving.

During the final round all of the students are given the same word. What almost always happens is that the first group, who had to work with progressively harder words, succeed again. The second group, who were set up to fail from the beginning, fail again. This is despite the fact that the anagram is the same one for both groups.

One group has been taught that they can affect the outcome by being given manageable steps to the final puzzle. The second group have been misled into believing that they cannot affect the outcome and as a result they fail without even trying. This is ‘learned helplessness’ and it’s something that sooner or later, every sportsman has to deal with and overcome.