Songs You Hate Become Songs You Like
Robert Zajonc showed in 1968 that hearing a thing more often makes you like it. It works on nonsense words too.
In 1968, Robert Zajonc ran a sequence of studies at the University of Michigan that still set the floor for how we understand liking. He showed participants Turkish-looking nonsense words, Chinese characters, and photos of faces. The more times a stimulus appeared, the higher people rated it afterwards — even when they didn't remember seeing it before.
Zajonc called it the mere-exposure effect. The pattern held across languages, cultures, and stimulus types. Later meta-analyses pulled in hundreds of replications and put the effect at a respectable size, especially when the first few exposures are brief and subconscious.
The curve isn't linear. Liking rises sharply with the first few repetitions, plateaus, and then dips if exposure drags on. Overplay a song and you burn the familiarity advantage; repeated ad impressions run the same curve. Radio programmers learned this on instinct decades before they knew the paper existed.
The effect is stubborn. It shows up with stimuli presented so fast that subjects can't consciously identify them. It shows up in infants, who prefer the shape of faces they've already seen. It doesn't require the stimulus to be pleasant on first contact — studies deliberately used neutral or even faintly unpleasant inputs and still got the lift.
One practical read: the first time a song, face, accent, or brand name lands as foreign, your reaction is noise. Wait a week. Your own familiarity will move your taste several ticks before any other factor has a chance to.
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