... Although making one or two attempts at jumping the barrier, they did not continue to try and escape the pain and had to be helped over the barrier over 200 times before successfully doing it on their own. This experiment gave evidence to support that these dogs learned no behaviour on their part had any effect on whether the shocks occurred or not. This enabled Seligman's concept of learned helplessness that was demonstrated widely in the further research of Hiroto (1974) and his findings of learned helplessness in humans. Humans were found to have similar "hopeless" reactions to those of Seligman's experimental dogs when put into the situations of experiencing an uncontrollable event or failure of a task. What preceded this theory was the importance of the attribution process. Initial failure was often a result of lack of effort and not all humans experienced this hopelessness. A higher performance was ...

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