Mere-exposure Effect
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

The mere-exposure effect is a
psychological Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...
phenomenon by which people tend to develop a liking or disliking for things merely because they are familiar with them. In
social psychology Social psychology is the methodical study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Although studying many of the same substantive topics as its counterpart in the field ...
, this effect is sometimes called the familiarity principle. The effect has been demonstrated with many kinds of things, including words,
Chinese character Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represent the only on ...
s, paintings, pictures of faces, geometric figures, and sounds. In studies of
interpersonal attraction Interpersonal attraction, as a part of social psychology, is the study of the attraction between people which leads to the development of platonic or romantic relationships. It is distinct from perceptions such as physical attractiveness, and ...
, the more often people see a person, the more pleasing and likeable they find that person.


Research

Gustav Fechner Gustav Theodor Fechner (; ; 19 April 1801 – 18 November 1887) was a German physicist, philosopher, and experimental psychologist. A pioneer in experimental psychology and founder of psychophysics (techniques for measuring the mind), he inspi ...
conducted the earliest known research on the effect in 1876. Edward B. Titchener also documented the effect and described the "glow of warmth" felt in the presence of something familiar; 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. The rejection of Titchener's hypothesis spurred further research and the development of current theory. The scholar best known for developing the mere-exposure effect is
Robert Zajonc Robert BolesÅ‚aw Zajonc ( /ˈzaɪ.É™nts/ ''ZY-É™nts''; Polish: ˆzajÉ”ntÍ¡s November 23, 1923 – December 3, 2008) was an American social psychologist who is known for his decades of work on a wide range of social and cognitive processes. One ...
. Before conducting his research, he observed that exposure to a novel stimulus initially elicits a fear/avoidance response in all organisms. Each subsequent exposure to the novel stimulus causes less fear and more interest in the observing organism. After repeated exposure, the observing organism will begin to react fondly to the once novel stimulus. This observation led to the research and development of the mere-exposure effect.


Zajonc (1960s–1990s)

In the 1960s, a series of
Robert Zajonc Robert BolesÅ‚aw Zajonc ( /ˈzaɪ.É™nts/ ''ZY-É™nts''; Polish: ˆzajÉ”ntÍ¡s November 23, 1923 – December 3, 2008) was an American social psychologist who is known for his decades of work on a wide range of social and cognitive processes. One ...
'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. At first, Zajonc looked at language and the frequency of words used. He found that overall positive words were used more than their negative counterparts. 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. In 1980, Zajonc proposed the affective primacy hypothesis: that affective reactions (such as liking) can be "elicited with minimal stimulus input." Through mere-exposure experiments, Zajonc sought to provide evidence for the affective-primacy hypothesis, namely that affective judgments are made without prior cognitive processes. He tested this hypothesis by presenting repeated stimuli to participants at suboptimal thresholds such that they did not show conscious awareness or recognition of the repeated stimuli (when asked whether they had seen the image, responses were at chance level), but continued to show affective bias toward the repeatedly exposed stimuli. Zajonc compared results from primes exposed longer, which allowed for conscious awareness, to stimuli shown so briefly that participants did not show conscious awareness. He found that the primes shown more briefly and not recognized prompted faster responses for liking than primes shown at conscious levels. One experiment to test the mere-exposure effect used fertile chicken eggs. Tones of two different frequencies were played to different groups of chicks while they were still unhatched. Once hatched, each tone was played to both groups of chicks. Each set of chicks consistently chose the tone prenatally played to it. Another experiment exposed two groups of people to Chinese characters for short times. Participants were then told that these symbols represented adjectives and were asked to rate whether the symbols held positive or negative connotations. The symbols the participants had previously seen were consistently rated more positively than those they had not. In a similar experiment, people were not asked to rate the connotations of the symbols, but to describe their mood after the experiment. Members of the group with repeated exposure to certain characters reported being in better moods than those without. In yet another variation, participants were shown an image on a
tachistoscope A tachistoscope is a device that displays a picture, text, or an object for a specific amount of time. It can be used for various purposes such as to increase recognition speed, to show something too fast to be consciously recognized, or to test ...
for a very brief duration that could not be perceived consciously. This subliminal exposure produced the same effect, though it is important to note that subliminal effects are unlikely to occur without controlled laboratory conditions. According to Zajonc, the mere-exposure effect is capable of taking place without conscious cognition, and "preferences need no inferences". This claim has spurred much research in the relationship between cognition and affect. Zajonc explains that if preferences (or attitudes) were based merely on information units with affect attached to them, then persuasion would be fairly simple. He argues that this is not the case: such simple persuasion tactics have failed miserably. Zajonc states that affective responses to stimuli happen much more quickly than cognitive responses, and that these responses are often made with much more confidence. He states that thought (cognition) and feeling (affect) are distinct, and that cognition is not free from affect, nor is affect free of cognition: that "the form of experience that we came to call feeling accompanies all cognitions, that it arises early in the process of registration and retrieval, albeit weakly and vaguely, and that it derives from a parallel, separate, and partly independent system in the organism." According to Zajonc, there is no empirical proof that cognition precedes any form of decision-making. While this is a common assumption, Zajonc argues it is more likely that decisions are made with little to no cognition. He equates deciding upon something with liking it, meaning that we cognize reasons to rationalize a decision more often than deciding upon it. In other words, we make judgments first, and then seek to justify them by rationalization.


Goetzinger (1968)

Charles Goetzinger conducted an experiment using the mere-exposure effect on his class at
Oregon State University Oregon State University (OSU) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Corvallis, Oregon, United States. OSU offers more than 200 undergraduate degree programs and a variety of graduate and doctor ...
. Goetzinger had a student come to class in a large black bag with only his feet visible. The black bag sat on a table in the back of the classroom. Goetzinger's experiment was to observe if the students would treat the black bag in accordance to Zajonc's mere-exposure effect. His hypothesis was confirmed. The students in the class first treated the black bag with hostility, which over time turned into curiosity, and eventually friendship. 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."


Bornstein (1989)

A
meta-analysis Meta-analysis is a method of synthesis of quantitative data from multiple independent studies addressing a common research question. An important part of this method involves computing a combined effect size across all of the studies. As such, th ...
of 208 experiments found that the mere-exposure effect is robust and
reliable Reliability, reliable, or unreliable may refer to: Science, technology, and mathematics Computing * Data reliability (disambiguation), a property of some disk arrays in computer storage * Reliability (computer networking), a category used to des ...
, with an
effect size In statistics, an effect size is a value measuring the strength of the relationship between two variables in a population, or a sample-based estimate of that quantity. It can refer to the value of a statistic calculated from a sample of data, the ...
of ''r''=0.26. This analysis found that the effect is strongest when unfamiliar stimuli are presented briefly. Mere exposure typically reaches its maximum effect within 10–20 presentations, and some studies even show that liking may decline after a longer series of exposures. For example, people generally like a song more after they have heard it a few times, but many repetitions can reduce this preference. A delay between exposure and the measurement of liking actually tends to increase the strength of the effect. The effect is weaker on children, and for drawings and paintings as compared to other types of stimuli. One social psychology experiment showed that exposure to people we initially dislike makes us dislike them even more.


Zola–Morgan (2001)

In support of Zajonc's claim that affect does not need cognition to occur, Zola–Morgan conducted experiments on monkeys with lesions to the
amygdala The amygdala (; : amygdalae or amygdalas; also '; Latin from Greek language, Greek, , ', 'almond', 'tonsil') is a paired nucleus (neuroanatomy), nuclear complex present in the Cerebral hemisphere, cerebral hemispheres of vertebrates. It is c ...
(the brain structure that is responsive to affective stimuli). In his experiments, Zola–Morgan proved that lesions to the amygdala impair affective functioning, but not cognitive processes. However, lesions in the
hippocampus The hippocampus (: hippocampi; via Latin from Ancient Greek, Greek , 'seahorse'), also hippocampus proper, is a major component of the brain of humans and many other vertebrates. In the human brain the hippocampus, the dentate gyrus, and the ...
(the brain structure responsible for memory) impair cognitive functions but leave emotional responses fully functional.


Montoya et al. (2017)

These authors reviewed evidence that with sufficient repetitions the ascending curve for liking turns down (in the form of an inverted-U). The evidence goes back at least thirty years.


Perceptual fluency

The mere-exposure effect posits that repeated exposure to a stimulus increases ''perceptual fluency'', the ease with which a stimulus can be processed. Perceptual fluency, in turn, increases positive affect. Studies showed that repeated exposure increases perceptual fluency, confirming positive affect in autobiographical memory and perceptual learning, a finding supported in later studies.


Application


Advertising

The most obvious application of the mere-exposure effect is in advertising, but research on its effectiveness at enhancing consumer attitudes toward particular companies and products has been mixed. One study tested the mere-exposure effect with
banner ad A web banner or banner ad is a Online Advertising, form of advertising on the World Wide Web delivered by an ad server. This form of online advertising entails embedding an advertisement into a web page. It is intended to attract web traffic, tra ...
s on a computer screen. College-age students were asked to read an article on the computer while banner ads flashed at the top of the screen. The results showed that the students exposed to the "test" banner rated the ad more favorably than other ads shown less frequently or not at all. This research supports the mere-exposure effect. A different study showed that higher levels of media exposure are associated with lower reputations for companies, even when the exposure is mostly positive. A subsequent review of the research concluded that exposure leads to
ambivalence Ambivalence is a state of having simultaneous conflicting reactions, beliefs, or feelings towards some object. Stated another way, ambivalence is the experience of having an attitude towards someone or something that contains both positively and n ...
because it brings about a large number of associations, which tend to be both favorable and unfavorable. Exposure is most likely to be helpful when a company or product is new and unfamiliar to consumers. An "optimal" level of exposure to an advertisement may not exist. In a third study, experimenters primed consumers with affective motives. One group of thirsty consumers was primed with a happy face before being offered a beverage, while a second group was primed with an unpleasant face. Those primed with the happy face bought more beverages, and were also willing to pay more for the beverage than their unhappy counterparts. This study bolsters Zajonc's claim that choices are not in need of cognition. Buyers often choose what they "like" instead of what they have substantially thought about. In the advertising world, the mere-exposure effect suggests that consumers need not think about advertisements: simple repetition is enough to make a "memory trace" in the consumer's mind and unconsciously affect their consuming behavior. One scholar explained this relationship as follows: "The approach tendencies created by mere exposure may be preattitudinal in the sense that they do not require the type of deliberate processing that is required to form brand attitude."


Other areas

The mere-exposure effect exists in most areas of human
decision-making In psychology, decision-making (also spelled decision making and decisionmaking) is regarded as the Cognition, cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several possible alternative options. It could be ...
. 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. The mere-exposure effect also distorts the results of journal-ranking surveys; academics who previously published or completed reviews for a particular
academic journal An academic journal (or scholarly journal or scientific journal) is a periodical publication in which Scholarly method, scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. They serve as permanent and transparent forums for the ...
rate it dramatically higher than those who did not. There are mixed results on the question of whether mere exposure can promote good relations between different social groups. When groups already have negative attitudes to each other, further exposure can increase hostility. A statistical analysis of voting patterns found that candidates' exposure has a strong effect on the number of votes they receive, distinct from the popularity of their policies.


See also

* * * * * *


References


External links


Changing minds: Mere exposure theory
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mere Exposure Effect Cognitive biases Memory biases