The mere exposure effect: why familiarity breeds content

You may have had the experience of heading out for the night, feeling good, snapping a few selfies of yourself with friends to memorialise how great your hair was looking. Only to find, the next day, that photos taken of you by friends from the same evening aren’t quite so flattering.

How did you look so good in the images you took of yourself and not in those snapped by your pals?

The answer lies in something called ‘the mere exposure’ effect, a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things because they are familiar with them.

This effect can apply in the preference we usually have for ‘our version’ of how we look, having seen this appearance most often in the mirror (but which is actually a flipped image of ourselves) – but can also extend to how marketing (and propaganda) messages make us feel, and – in the healing of phobias – in how it is possible to neutralise visual stimuli we might otherwise find disturbing.

View the original video here.

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