The answer is helplessness theory or learned helplessness. It is when people feel helpless to avoid negative situations because previous experience has shown them that they do not have control. An example is imagine that you just failed a major test. There are some things that you could say were the reason for that: 'I'm stupid.' 'I didn't study hard enough.' 'The test was too hard.'
Each of those reasons can be seen as a not the same type of attribution. An attribution is an aspect that a person blames for the consequence of a situation. The three types of attribution is global, stable, and internal. An internal attribution is any attribution that gives the root of an event as something to do with the person, as contrasting to something in the outside world. A stable attribution is one that doesn't change over time or across situations. Finally, a global attribution is the acceptance that the factors affecting the consequence relates to a large number of situations, not just one of them.
