#PSYCHOLOGICAL PHENOMENA MIRROR SERIES#

Zajonc explains that if preferences (or attitudes) were based merely on information units with affect attached to them, then persuasion would be fairly simple. This claim has spurred much research in the relationship between cognition and affect. Īccording to Zajonc, the mere-exposure effect is capable of taking place without conscious cognition, and 'preferences need no inferences'. This subliminal exposure produced the same effect, though it is important to note that subliminal effects are unlikely to occur without controlled laboratory conditions. In yet another variation, participants were shown an image on a tachistoscope for a very brief duration that could not be perceived consciously. Members of the group with repeated exposure to certain characters reported being in better moods than those without. In a similar experiment, people were not asked to rate the connotations of the symbols, but to describe their mood after the experiment. The symbols the participants had previously seen were consistently rated more positively than those they had not.

Participants were then told that these symbols represented adjectives and were asked to rate whether the symbols held positive or negative connotations. Īnother experiment exposed two groups of people to Chinese characters for short times.

Each set of chicks consistently chose the tone prenatally played to it. Once hatched, each tone was played to both groups of chicks. Tones of two different frequencies were played to different groups of chicks while they were still unhatched. One experiment to test the mere-exposure effect used fertile chicken eggs. He found that the primes shown more briefly and not recognized prompted faster responses for liking than primes shown at conscious levels. 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 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. 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. 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. He found that overall positive words were used more than their negative counterparts. At first, Zajonc looked at language and the frequency of words used.

#PSYCHOLOGICAL PHENOMENA MIRROR SERIES#

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. This observation led to the research and development of the mere-exposure effect. After repeated exposure, the observing organism will begin to react fondly to the once novel stimulus. Each subsequent exposure to the novel stimulus causes less fear and more interest in the observing organism. Before conducting his research, he observed that exposure to a novel stimulus initially elicits a fear/avoidance response in all organisms. The scholar best known for developing the mere-exposure effect is Robert Zajonc. The rejection of Titchener's hypothesis spurred further research and the development of current theory.

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. Gustav Fechner conducted the earliest known research on the effect in 1876. In studies of interpersonal attraction, the more often people see a person, the more pleasing and likeable they find that person. The effect has been demonstrated with many kinds of things, including words, Chinese characters, paintings, pictures of faces, geometric figures, and sounds. In social psychology, this effect is sometimes called the familiarity principle. The mere-exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them. For other uses of 'Familiarity', see Familiarity (disambiguation).

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