Mere-exposure effect
The mere-exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a liking or disliking for things merely because they are familiar with them.
The effect has been demonstrated with many kinds of things, including words, Chinese characters, paintings, pictures of faces, geometric figures, and sounds.
[2] Edward B. Titchener also documented the effect and described the "glow of warmth" felt in the presence of something familiar;[3] however, his hypothesis was thrown out when results showed that the enhancement of preferences for objects did not depend on the individual's subjective impressions of how familiar the objects were.
[4] In the 1960s, a series of Robert Zajonc's laboratory experiments demonstrated that simply exposing participants to a familiar stimulus led them to rate it more positively than other, similar stimuli that had not been presented before.
[4] Later, he showed similar results for liking, pleasantness, and forced-choice measures from a variety of stimuli, such as polygons, drawings, photographs of expressions, nonsense words, and idiographs.
Through mere-exposure experiments, Zajonc sought to provide evidence for the affective-primacy hypothesis, namely that affective judgments are made without prior cognitive processes.
[8] According to Zajonc, the mere-exposure effect is capable of taking place without conscious cognition, and "preferences need no inferences".
Zajonc explains that if preferences (or attitudes) were based merely on information units with affect attached to them, then persuasion would be fairly simple.
Charles Goetzinger conducted an experiment using the mere-exposure effect on his class at Oregon State University.
Goetzinger's experiment was to observe if the students would treat the black bag in accordance to Zajonc's mere-exposure effect.
The students in the class first treated the black bag with hostility, which over time turned into curiosity, and eventually friendship.
[4] This experiment confirms Zajonc's mere-exposure effect, by simply presenting the black bag over and over again to the students their attitudes were changed, or as Zajonc states "mere repeated exposure of the individual to a stimulus is a sufficient condition for the enhancement of his attitude toward it.
[1] These authors reviewed evidence that with sufficient repetitions the ascending curve for liking turns down (in the form of an inverted-U).
College-age students were asked to read an article on the computer while banner ads flashed at the top of the screen.
[19] A subsequent review of the research concluded that exposure leads to ambivalence because it brings about a large number of associations, which tend to be both favorable and unfavorable.
For example, many stock traders tend to invest in securities of domestic companies merely because they are more familiar with them, even though international markets offer similar or better alternatives.
[24] There are mixed results on the question of whether mere exposure can promote good relations between different social groups.
