The mere exposure effect, sometimes called the familiarity principle, refers to a psychological trait where people develop a preference for something simply because they're familiar with it.
The effect has been demonstrated across cultures and with multiple types of stimuli including: faces, Chinese characters, language, and sounds.
It explains decisions by stock traders, distortions in academic journal rankings and quite likely much of the success of chain restaurants and hotels.
The person most frequently associated with the mere exposure effect is Robert Zajonc, a social psychologist who helped found the field of social cognition. Zajonc wrote a paper in 1980 titled “Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences” that challenged the prevailing belief of the day that we are rational thinkers.
Zajonc wrote about what he called affect or what we might refer to as the emotional or the unconscious mind. As he opens his paper:
One cannot be introduced to a person without experiencing some immediate feeling of attraction or repulsion and without gauging such feelings on the part of the other. We evaluate each others’ behavior, and we evaluate the motives and the consequences of their behavior. And you have already made up your mind about this paper!
Contrary to Enlightenment thought, where the prevailing view is that the conscious mind guides all decisions, Zajonc argued that affect is always present as a companion to cognition where the opposite is not always true. Many decisions are made completely without the rational mind.
One of Zajonc’s first experiments involved printing a silly sounding word on the front page of the student newspaper in Michigan every day for several weeks. Words like: kardirga, saricik, biwonjini, and nansoma. He sent questionnaires to readers and asked them to categorize the word as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Words that appeared in print many times were judged to be more positive than those that didn’t or only appeared once or twice.
Repetition in a trusted source gave the words a positive feeling or feeling of trustworthiness.
Just repetition in a newspaper.
No explanation.
Why does this matter?
If we really wanted to have a greater effect in political conversations, we would repeat ourselves more often.
In much of the academic world, however, repetition tends not to be valued. Value is placed on extending the science and coming up with novel ideas.
One crucial exception to this is our public education system. At the K-12 level, repetition seems much more acceptable.
I believe this has carried over into the political realm where academic thinking informs liberal political thought. Whether this is true or not, liberals often seem to think repetition is stupid.
I’ve had many people tell me that FoxNews is stupid and mindless repetition. If science tells us that people learn through repeated exposure, is it FoxNews that’s stupid?
*None of the above in any way implies agreement with any of the political views of FoxNews.
If we want to have more success in our political conversations, we’d do better if we repeated ourselves more often.
A couple caveats
If you are perceived as an “enemy,” repeating yourself isn't going to help much. You will have more success if you are perceived as independent or, at least, not hostile.
If you are the enemy, you may entrench opposing ideas due to the “backfire effect” in which someone who feels attacked digs in and defends their beliefs. This suggests focusing on independents rather than getting into head-to-head rage fights with true believers.
Glenn Beck wrote a book called Arguing With Idiots. I don’t agree with Glenn Beck much but what do you think your odds are of influencing someone like Glenn Beck or someone who has bought into the cult-like thinking? Don’t waste your time on these people.
Do you really think you can win over someone who dresses up like a commissar?
You also want to be sure to present ideas in a positive manner. Perlman and Oskamp demonstrated that presenting stimulus in a negative light leads to a decrease in attractiveness.
Any discussion of influence usually makes people uncomfortable
I find this interesting because I know people who beat their head against the wall 24/7 ineffectively trying to win people with facts.
Yet any methods that might be more effective are scorned or characterized as manipulation or deceit.
Be honest about your beliefs. It simply does matter how you present them and repetition is one technique you can use to help reunite people with some ideas that don’t get talked about much.
What is most worth repeating?
George Lakoff suggests talking about your values. I agree. However, Lakoff is often misinterpreted as messaging.
Here’s George Lakoff in Salon discussing what he learned rather recently:
So people never got that idea. They thought I was talking about language, about messaging. They thought that there were magic words, that if I gave the right words, immediately everybody would get it and be persuaded. They didn’t understand how any of this works. And I, coming into this, didn’t understand what the problem was. It took me a while to figure it out. …
… People thought that when I was talking about framing that I was talking about words. This is what Frank Luntz keeps saying, “Words that Work.” The reason he can do that is that on the right, the think tanks figured out the frames before he came along. All he had to do was supply the words for the frames, whereas we have to think out the whole thing.
Magic words aren’t going to do the trick. A better way to think about Lakoff is to think of value frames as “big ideas”.
A “big idea” is a core value or principle that you base your actions on. It’s a belief. Conservatives understand big ideas. Smaller government is, ironically enough, what I would call a big idea. Personal responsibility is a big idea. Markets are a big idea.
A big idea answers the question “Why?” not “How?”
Everyone, whether you like it or not, can explain market fundamentalism. It is because corporate think tanks have familiarized us with this idea to the point that many people make spot decisions based on whether or not it’s perceived as freeing a market.
No one questions why we’re not freeing people unless you help them out by talking about what freedom really is. For example, freedom is not having to work 3 jobs just to put food on the table.
When liberals talk about big ideas, we typically talk about policies. Reversing Citizens’ United, for example, is not a big idea. It tells me nothing about why we want to reverse it.
If we look at a typical survey from a progressive group, you’ll usually find a lot of policy recommendations.
Social security and Medicare are policies. Obamacare is a policy. Campaign finance reform is a policy. Wall Street reform is a policy. Afghanistan is a country. Tax the rich is a policy. Reproductive choice and women’s issues is a series of policies. These all answer the question “how”. These all assume some underlying liberal beliefs in freedom, mutual responsibility, equality, and democracy that are very different from what we hear on corporate media.
Big ideas answer the question “Why?”
For example, I don’t necessarily care how “big” or “small” government is. I care that it’s democratic and not corrupt. I care that it serves people. Democracy is a big idea. I believe we want a more democratic society. This is why I believe voting rights, campaign finance reform, Wall Street reform and accountability, and NSA surveillance reform and accountability would make good policies.
Corporate special interest groups are replacing democracy with this idea that we should always seek to minimize government. Unfortunately, these groups have very deep pockets and also understand how most political decisions are made by the unconscious or emotional mind.
Don’t believe me? Try to find democracy mentioned in the media. Usually it is in connection with other countries: Sri Lanka’s Victory for Democracy, for example. Compare how much we talk about markets compared to how much we talk about democracy.
So talk about your beliefs. Tell stories about what they mean to you in a positive light. And repeat.
If you own a media network or can get something published in the media, do. Even if it’s a letter to the editor.
It also helps if you keep the ideas simple and present them in a memorable way.
Don’t waste your time on the small hard-core group that you have no chance of convincing. Fortunately, I think you’ll find this group is much smaller than you think. In my experience, it’s roughly 10%. Most people are much more open. Especially if you can keep your cool and talk about what you believe rather than falling into the fact fallacy trap.
As Zajonc says at the end of “Feeling and Thinking”:
People do not get married or divorced, commit murder or suicide, or lay down their lives for freedom upon a detailed cognitive analysis of the pros and cons of their actions. If we stop to consider just how much variance is controlled by cognitive processes and how much by affect, and how much the one and the other influence the important outcomes in our lives, we cannot but agree that affective phenomena deserve far more attention than they have received from cognitive psychologists and a closer cognitive scrutiny from social psychologists.
I think we could all benefit from understanding how people frequently make decisions not consciously, but automatically based on preferences and values (big ideas) they've internalized over the years.
If we want people to make better decisions, we need to cultivate better values.
More tips and practical examples for winning people over can be found here. If you’re interested in taking some tests that show you some of your own unconscious biases, go here.
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David Akadjian is the author of The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy.