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 hundreds of versions of this experiment, 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. And people often could not even remember having seen the items before. 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 quietly turns into liking, and liking disguises itself as judgment. 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.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman, 2011

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