Psychology Wonders #3
The Takeaway
Simply seeing or hearing something over and over makes us more likely to like it — even if we were never interested in it to begin with. Psychologists call this the mere exposure effect.
The Song You Never Chose to Like
A song that did nothing for you at first ends up on your lips after it has played in the background on your commute a few times.
A new colleague felt distant at first, but after seeing their face every day, a sense of familiarity quietly grows.
Nothing about the song improved. The colleague did nothing special for you. And yet the liking arrived anyway.
Psychology has a name for this “the more familiar it looks, the more we like it” phenomenon: the mere exposure effect.
An Experiment with Meaningless Things
In 1968, psychologist Robert Zajonc set out to test it using things that meant nothing at all.
The stimuli he showed participants were things like these:
- Nonsense words that resembled Turkish
- Unreadable figures that looked like Chinese characters
- Photographs of the faces of men nobody knew
The number of times each item was shown had been varied in advance: 0, 1, 2, 5, 10, or 25 times.
Afterwards, participants rated how much they liked each one — and the result was clear.
The more times an item had been shown, the more favourably it was rated.
Even meaningless symbols, and the faces of people they had never met, earned more liking simply for having been seen more often.
It Works Even When You Don’t Remember Seeing It
More surprising still: the effect works even when you have no memory of seeing the thing at all.
In a 1980 experiment, figures were shown for just 1 millisecond. That is far too brief to take in — participants could not tell which figures they had been shown. Their recognition rate was 48%, essentially chance level.
And yet, when asked which of two figures they preferred, they chose the one that had been flashed at them 60% of the time.
They did not remember it. But they liked it.
Why Does This Happen?
One reason is that the brain tends to read “familiar” as “not dangerous.” We stay on guard around things we see for the first time, but if nothing happens after repeated encounters, the brain learns that it is safe.
Another reason is that familiar things are easier to process. Something you can take in at a glance simply feels pleasant.
In part, the brain may be inventing the reasons for our liking after the fact.
But It Has Its Limits
The effect does not grow forever.
A 1989 analysis combining 208 experiments confirmed that the effect itself is real, but also found that beyond a certain number of exposures it levels off — and can even backfire, as we grow bored with the thing.
And forcing yourself to keep encountering something you already dislike will not necessarily turn it into something you like.
So the mere exposure effect is not the magic of “meet enough times and you’ll always get along.”
Even so, it explains most cases of people and things whose first impression was faint, yet somehow became a familiar presence in our lives.
What we like is not decided by the contents alone.
Our preferences are quietly pulled by something as plain as how many times we have met.
References
- Zajonc, “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure” (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1968)
- Kunst-Wilson & Zajonc, “Affective Discrimination of Stimuli That Cannot Be Recognized” (Science, 1980)
- Bornstein, “Exposure and Affect: Overview and Meta-Analysis of Research, 1968–1987” (Psychological Bulletin, 1989)
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