The mere exposure effect

A researcher showed people meaningless things: nonsense words invented for the study, shapes they had never seen, symbols from an alphabet they could not read. Some items were shown once, others many times, in quick succession, too fast to really study. Later, people were asked which ones they liked. Across more than two hundred experiments, the answer was consistent: they preferred the ones they had seen more often. Not because those were better, they were all equally meaningless, but simply because they were familiar. In later versions, people preferred the familiar items even when they could not remember having seen them. The liking came without the memory. Familiarity alone, with no positive experience attached, was enough to breed preference.

The option that feels like the obvious choice is sometimes just the one you have encountered the most. Repeated exposure turns into liking, and liking disguises itself as judgement. This shows up when the familiar candidate, the familiar vendor, the familiar idea feels safer and better without any evidence that it is. Before you go with the one that simply feels right, ask whether it is genuinely stronger or merely more familiar. Sometimes the newcomer loses to the incumbent for no better reason than that you have seen the incumbent more times.

Source: Zajonc, Attitudinal effects of mere exposure, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1968. The review: Bornstein, Exposure and affect, Psychological Bulletin, 1989, 208 experiments. Liking without recognition: Kunst-Wilson and Zajonc, 1980.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman, 2011

On how ease and familiarity get mistaken for truth and quality.