ABSTRACT
Folk wisdom tells us that “familiarity breeds contempt”, but studies suggest otherwise. Beginning with the work of Titchener (1910), psychologists have been intrigued by the possibility that repeated, unreinforced exposure to a stimulus would result in increased liking for that stimulus. Zajonc (1968) coined the term mere exposure effect (MEE) to describe this phenomenon, and since the publication of Zajonc’s seminal (1968) paper, there have been nearly 300 published studies of the MEE. The MEE occurs for a broad array of stimuli (e.g., drawings, photographs, musical selections, real words, nonsense words, ideographs) under a variety of laboratory and real-world conditions. Bornstein’s (1989) meta-analysis of research on the MEE indicated that the overall magnitude of the effect (expressed in terms of the correlation coefficient r) was .26, a moderate effect size. Subsequent investigations have confirmed this result (e.g., Monahan, Murphy, & Zajonc, 2000; Seamon, McKenna, & Binder, 1998).
