Charlotte Nickerson wrote an article for Simply Psychology titled Mere Exposure Effect in Psychology: Biases & Heuristics (October 10, 2023).
« The mere exposure effect is a cognitive bias where individuals show a preference for things they’re more familiar with. Repeated exposure to a stimulus increases liking and familiarity, even without conscious recognition. Essentially, the more we encounter something, the more we tend to prefer it, based on familiarity alone. »
« The mere exposure effect refers to the tendency for people to develop a preference for things simply because they are familiar with them, even if they have no specific information about the merits of those things. »
« This effect is most likely to happen when individuals have no pre-existing negative attitude toward the stimulus and tends to be strongest when they are not aware of the stimulus presented to them. »
Advertising
« Janiszewski (1993), for example, found that mere exposure to a brand name or product package can encourage a consumer to have a more favorable attitude toward the brand. »
Robert Zajonc
« The first scientist to identify the mere exposure effect was Robert Zajonc. According to Zajonc’s mere exposure hypothesis, the repeated exposure of an individual to a stimulus is sufficient for that individual to develop a more enhanced attitude toward that stimulus. »
« Zajonc suggests that the relationship between exposure and liking has the shape of a positive, decelerating curve. The more someone is exposed to a stimulus, the more they like it, but the first few exposures are much more powerful than later ones (Zajonc, 1968). » [diminishing returns, logarithmic]
3 Types of Studies
« To support his hypothesis, Zajonc discussed three types of supporting studies (1968). »
Word Frequency and Word Evaluation
« In 26 of 30 pairs of words, the high-frequency member was chosen to have a more positive connotation than the less frequent word, and nonsense words with familiar English-language letter combinations tended to receive more favorable ratings than nonsense words that did not contain familiar letter combinations. »
« To add to this prior research, Zajonc (1968) asked students to indicate which members of 154 pairs of antonyms had the most favorable meanings. He found that over 80% of the time, the high-frequency member tended to be designated as more favorable. »
« However, it must be noted that these studies do not provide definitive support for the mere exposure hypothesis. For example, people’s liking and more positive connotations of high-frequency words may not be the result of exposure leading to liking, but liking a stimulus increases the probability that it will be discussed. »
Interpersonal Contact and Interpersonal Attraction
« Studies have shown, in general, that there is a correlation between familiarity and liking for individuals and groups. »
« For example, Harrison (1969), in studying liking ratings of 200 public figures and of 40 fabricated individuals, correlated strongly with their exposure to printed media, and Stang (1975a) found that the ratings of presidents in the United States correlated strongly with how much their names were published in archival sources. »
« Additionally, many experiments on the effects of exposure on attraction have focused on the effect. In one such experiment, Stang (1974a) posted either 0, 20, or 200 posters asking students to elect a fictitious person to the editorship of a student publication. »
« Those who had seen the [posters] were more likely to vote for the publicized candidate. In another study using photographs, L. R. Wilson and Nakajo (1966) found that increasing the number of times a person’s photograph was shown led to increasingly favorable ratings of personality, social appeal, and emotional stability. » [political campaigns, incumbents]
Musical Familiarity and Liking
« In contrast to the word frequency and interpersonal exposure studies discussed before, many studies investigating the effects of exposure to reactions to musical selections have shown that low and intermediate-frequency stimuli tend to be the best-liked (Harrison, 1977). » [jingles]
Other Factors Leading to Increased Likeability
Initial Familiarity
« If a stimulus is already familiar, manipulating how much someone is exposed to it is unlikely to enhance that person’s attitude»
Discriminability
« maximum liking for the less-discriminable stimuli required a greater number of exposures (Harrison, 1977). »
Context
« Exposure does not occur in a vacuum, and thus, the affective reactions elicited by a situation or context in which exposure occurs can become increasingly associated with the exposure stimuli as exposure progresses. Therefore, if a stimulus is presented in a context that elicits unpleasant emotional reactions, exposure should lead to a decreased liking for that stimulus and vice versa (Burgess and Sales, 1971). »
Presentation Sequence
« Exposing a stimulus within a “heterogeneous” sequence — one where other stimuli are interspersed — is more likely to result in an exposure effect than one where a “homogeneous” or uninterrupted sequence with the stimulus is presented. »
Articles of Interest 