There was a tiger named Mohini at the Washington DC zoo who was confined to a 12x12 cement floor cage. She would spend all day pacing back from one side to the other. Eventually, locals felt so bad that they built her a beautiful preserve out in the country. It had lush grasses and bushes and a little river running through it.

Crowds waited in excitement on the morning of her release. The as the zookeepers brought her in a crate and released her into her enclosure.

She made her way to a small tucked away corner of the new enclosure and began pacing back and forth in a 12 foot line. She did this for the rest of her life wearing away a 12’ track in the grass.

This gets at the model of learned helplessness. If we find ourselves repeatedly in situations where we can’t seem to affect the outcome. Our self-efficacy (belief in one’s innate ability to effect an outcome) is diminished to the point where we feel we can’t do anything. We just give up. Often this real or perceived lack of control leads to distress and unhappiness.

Research has found human reactions to feeling a lack of control differs both between individuals and between situations. Learned helplessness sometimes remains specific to one situation but at other times generalizes across situations.

Of course this does not always happen but may explain the challenge of sustained behavior change when people feel “stuck” or “in a rut” or maybe even to treatment resistant depression.

Bernard Weiner proposed a detailed account of the attributional approach to learned helplessness.

REF — Hiroto DS, Seligman ME (1975). "Generality of learned helplessness in man". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology31 (2): 311–27. doi:10.1037/h0076270.

REF — Weiner, B. (1986). An attributional theory of motivation and emotion. New York: Springer-Verlag.