Later research showed that without some kind of intervention reframing, this kind of passivity will become even more pronounced and predictable in a thinking style. Seligman put this thinking style into three categories, the "three P‘s," which are:
Personal
Pervasive
Permanent
The three P‘s are ways that people explain things that happen, and this thinking style shuts them down. It usually begins with asingle event. Say a salesperson calls a client to offer a new product, and the client says that he is not interested. Someone with optimistic software would think, "Oh, well. Guess that client doesn‘t need it, or he has a brother-in-law he buys from, or he is an idiot, or has anotherplan," or some other explanation like that. And then the sales person moves on and calls the next client, as if life is still normal and making calls leads to sales. But the person with learned helplessness thinks in a very different way, with the three P‘s now dictating how he experiences this episode.