Avoidance learning describes when an individual learns a behavior or response in order to avoid a stressful or unpleasant situation. The behavior is to avoid, or to remove oneself from, the situation. Co-action effects are effects on a task's performance attributable to the presence of someone else engaged in the same activity. Norman Triplett's cyclist experiment referenced earlier signifies a co-action effect. Robert B. Zajonc (November 23, 1923 – December 3, 2008) was a Polish-born American social psychologist, best known for his work on a wide range of social and cognitive processes. Before emigrating to the US, Zajonc endured Nazi bombings and prisons. His tumultuous upbringing led him on a path to academia—where he laid the foundation for the field of social psychology by exploring the connections between how people feel and how they think. Besides Social Facilitation which this paper is titled and about, Zajonc also demonstrated and coined the “mere exposure effect,” finding that people have positive feelings about things they’re familiar with. In a series of studies in the 1960s, Zajonc flashed random images in front of his subjects—Chinese characters, faces and geometric figures. When asked which images they liked the most, the subjects picked the ones they saw the most. Social Facilitation, or the audience effect, is the tendency for individuals to perform differently when in the mere presence of others. In practice, individuals perform better on simpler/well-rehearsed tasks and perform worse on complex or new ones in front of an audience. In relation to this effect, there are three main empirical relationships: activation, evaluation, and attention theories. Zajonc's research beginning in 1956 laid the foundations for the activation theory. Zajonc's generalized drive hypothesis was the first theory that addressed why the presence of others increased performance sometimes yet decreased it at other times, describing how we are physiologically aroused and how that affects our functioning. Another driver of social facilitation is the evaluation theory which relates to the systematic assessment of the worth or merit of some object. Finally, the attention theory takes into account possession in the mind including focalization and concentration of consciousness. Zajonc described this as an "old unresolved social psychological problem" because in academia it had bee introduced as early as 1897 by Triplett. Triplett's experiment had a simple design; a cyclist's performance when alone was compared with a cyclist's performance when racing against another cyclist. He found that the cyclist was slowest when he was only racing the clock and not against another cyclist. Triplett attributed these results to a competitive instinct which releases energy not available when pedaling alone.