Prolonged exposure to uncontrollable situations can cause individuals to become and remain dysfunctionally passive. This pattern, known as learned helplessness, is typically induced in lab settings using simple tasks, but real-world control involves complex, non-linear causal systems. In these environments, the ability to influence an outcome often diverges from the ease of achieving the specific result one wants. Moreover, ascribing agency to oneself is a non-trivial process that depends on prior mechanistic beliefs and counterfactual inference. To investigate these dynamics, we systematically manipulated structure, controllability, and reward prevalence while participants interacted with dynamic causal variables in real time. Whilst low levels of practical control reliably induced helpless behaviour, we found that this did not depend on reward prevalence or the accuracy of learners' causal beliefs.