Free-operant avoidance conditioning in individual and paired human subjects.

Male, medical and graduate students were subjected to a non-discriminated avoidance regimen with shock-shock and response-shock intervals of 10 sec. Using a yoked-chair procedure it was found that acquisition of the button-pressing avoidance response was influenced by the social environment in which the conditioning occurred. There was a significantly greater number of "learners" among subjects conditioned individually than among those exposed to the conditioning procedures in the presence of a second person.