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Mental Elevation

Mere-Exposure Effect

You don't like it because it's good. You like it because you've seen it 15 times.

Grounded in the research on Mere-exposure effect (Wikipedia)

Know what it actually is

The mere-exposure effect: you grow to like something just because you've been exposed to it repeatedly. No new info, no quality bump, just familiarity. Robert Zajonc ran the canonical experiments in the 1960s and his line was "preferences need no inferences" — your brain decides it likes something before it thinks about it. Gustav Fechner clocked it back in 1876; Zajonc made it a science.

Respect the numbers

Robert Bornstein's 1989 meta-analysis of 208 studies pinned the effect size at r=0.26 — small but rock-solid and everywhere. The peak hits around 10-20 exposures, then it flattens or reverses (overexposure breeds boredom — that's the inverted-U, Montoya et al. 2017). It even works subliminally: Zajonc flashed Chinese characters and polygons too fast to consciously register and people STILL rated them higher.

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