Does Bad Memory Make AI More Cautious? We Ran the Experiment A field study on injected memory, learned helplessness, and decision bias in LLMs The Question Humans have learned helplessness — a psychological phenomenon where repeated failures in one domain erode confidence and decision-making, sometimes generalizing to unrelated areas (Seligman, 1972). Fail enough times at math, and you might stop raising your hand in English class too. Do large language models exhibit the same pattern? We ran a controlled experiment to find out. The setup: inject fabricated "bad memory" into an AI agent's context and measure whether it changes how the agent makes decisions — specifically, risk tolerance in investment allocation and accuracy in math. The results were more nuanced — and more interesting — than we expected. Experimental Setup We used a simple but effective method: CLAUDE.md injection via Claude Code CLI .…