The Anything Blog—The Mere Exposure Effect

 

Hi everyone! One of the the most interesting psychological phenomenon to me is the mere exposure effect, or the idea that people tend to prefer things they're familiar with or repeatedly exposed to. The phenomenon was first introduced by Robert Zajonc, who conducted an experiment where participants read foreign words or nonsense words out loud with varying repetitions (ie one word was read 3 times, another 14, another 6, another 25, etc). Participants were then asked to guess how positive/negative they believed the meaning of each word was. The results indicated that completely unfamiliar, unread words were ranked the lowest, and those repeated more were more favored, with those being repeated 25 times ranking the highest. In another experiment, people were shown photographs of unfamiliar people, and similarly, participants claimed they'd like to meet the people in photographs they saw more often more. Zajonc also tested these ideas when images were flashed to participants for less than a second, making them unable to recognize which image had been shown, and found the same effect, that people subconsciously rated those they had seen in the flashed images more positively, even though they were not aware they had seen them before. Perhaps this idea seems a bit obvious, but it's interesting that there's specific evidence to prove it. 

 In real life, this effect can manifest in people repeatedly ordering the same dish from different restaurants (ie chicken tenders or pizza), preferring songs they've heard more often on the radio, feeling relief at seeing someone you've briefly met before at a gathering and sticking with them, gaining attraction for someone you previously didn't like after spending more time with them, or even voting. Studies show that in low stakes elections like local, school district, or student government voting when the candidates are relatively unknown, the exposure frequency to campaign posters with names of candidates was directly related to the number of votes candidates received. 

See you next week!

Sources:

https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/mere-exposure-effect 

https://www.verywellmind.com/mere-exposure-effect-7368184

https://www.thoughtco.com/mere-exposure-effect-4777824