Yep, there's a whole area of psych research on that: learned helplessnes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learne

Yep, there's a whole area of psych research on that: learned helplessnes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness). Seligman's famous experiment of conditioning dogs by electric shock demonstrated this... something you could probably get away with in 1967.