![]() He found that preferences not only increased for more frequently presented subliminal stimuli, despite the fact that people were unaware of having “seen” them, but even more significantly, he found that the effect was stronger for subliminally presented stimuli compared to consciously perceived stimuli. ![]() Using new display technologies that started becoming available in the 1970s, Zajonc began testing subjects with stimuli presented for as little as one-thousandth of a second (one millisecond). To settle conclusively the question of whether conscious thoughts might be slipping in as a source of the mere exposure effect, Zajonc began to explore whether stimuli experienced below the threshold of conscious awareness-that is, subliminal stimuli-could induce liking based on frequency alone. 2 It has come to be seen as one of the most consistent and persistent psychological phenomena ever discovered. Later studies by Zajonc and others demonstrated that the mere exposure effect was powerful and ubiquitous, occurring with words, numbers, faces, works of art, music, interpersonal interactions, and many other types of stimuli. Zajonc showed that people could develop preferences for things based on repetition of exposure alone, without any prior information processing or evaluation indeed, without even knowing their preferences were being influenced by exposure frequency.1 This was the first demonstration of the mere exposure effect. Since the symbols were completely novel and meaningless, there was no way for information processing to precede preference formation. Overwhelmingly, the more exposures of a symbol people saw, the more “positive” they rated it. Participants were then asked to guess whether the symbols represented positive or negative words. Some symbols were shown only once, others up to five times. In his most famous experiment, he had volunteers view a long series of simulated Chinese ideograms (mostly nonsense symbols in the style of real Chinese ideograms). In other words, you had to think about something before you could form a preference regarding it. Attitudes, in the form of likes, dislikes, and preferences among alternatives, were believed to form only later, based on those prior cognitive processes. Cognitions were believed to come first, in the form of information processing, evaluation, and inferences about a perceived object. According to that understanding, preferences were a result of conscious thinking. In an article titled “ Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure,” he described a series of experimental findings that fundamentally challenged the psychological understanding of preferences accepted at the time. Robert Zajonc first published his findings about the mere exposure effect in 1968.
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