The purpose of this research is to gather empirical evidence for attribution theory (Weiner in J Educ Psychol 71(1):3–25. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.71.1.3 , 1979) to explain students’ feelings of helplessness when learning mathematics. The relationships between mathematics literacy in PISA 2012 and learned helplessness were also observed. Korean and Finnish students’ responses were analyzed with ordinal and linear regression analyses. Similar patterns were found between the two countries when students attributed their failure to either ability or task difficulty, but different relationships were found for other attributions. The findings indicated necessity of cultural factors in addition to the attribution theory to understand students’ helplessness in learning mathematics better.