Learned helplessness
A pattern in which repeated experience of having no control leads people to stop trying, even after options for action appear.
Example
Years of missed targets in the news can leave someone convinced that nothing they do will matter.
The catch
The term comes from laboratory psychology and works only as an analogy for climate attitudes.
In more depth
Learned helplessness, explained.
The practical lesson from learned helplessness is that passivity responds to evidence of control. People who see an action change something are more likely to try again, which is why communication that pairs a problem with a feasible step tends to work better than warnings alone.
Later work by the researchers behind the original experiments revised the theory. They concluded that passivity is the default response to prolonged stress and that what people learn is the presence of control. Treat the term as a metaphor for a pattern of disengagement, closely related to climate fatalism, and avoid applying it as a diagnosis to a person or a population. Visible results, such as a repaired leak or a lower bill, give people the evidence that builds self-efficacy and collective efficacy.