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I wouldn’t say so, no. Learned helplessness is more: I couldn’t, therefore, I can’t, starting with the paradigmatic example of the tethered elephant. A lack of traction is more: I don’t know how, therefore, it’s impossible. A major difference is that you should expect the former only after extensive cudgeling, but the latter can arise out of a simple lack of stimulus. After all, the default state is not knowing how.
Small example. When my daughter was learning to crawl, she was REALLY mad. She wanted to get somewhere, but had no idea how to make it happen. She wound up going backwards a lot of the time! If I’d let her onto incel forums she’d be posting about “walkchads” and “leg ratio” and that she was NGMI (to the rattle which we’d put out of reach). But then she figured it out and everything was OK. She was frustrated, there was a lack of traction, then things came together. But you definitely couldn’t call that learned helplessness. Where would she have been able to learn it?
Sounds like your notion of traction is a combination of internal locus of control and grit, both of which are mostly reinforcement-learned by exerting deliberate effort towards a goal and then achieving that goal. Ideally this happens many times in varied contexts throughout the subject’s development.
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