Vicarious Conditioning

Vicarious conditioning is the acquisition of an emotional or behavioral response, such as fear, through observing another individual's reaction to a stimulus rather than experiencing that stimulus directly. In a series of studies beginning in the 1980s, Susan Mineka and Michael Cook found that laboratory-reared rhesus monkeys with no prior fear of snakes rapidly developed a lasting, intense fear after watching wild-reared monkeys react fearfully to a snake, with the acquired fear still present three months later. The findings showed that fear can spread through a group by observation alone, following patterns consistent with classical conditioning rather than simple imitation of rewarded behavior.