The Psychology Book

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inside, but none of the class had any
idea who it might be. Goetzinger
then observed the class to gauge
their reactions over time. Initially,
the students treated the black bag
with hostility, but this softened in
time and they were eventually
friendly and even protective toward
the person in the bag. Goetzinger
noted that the students’ attitude
gradually “changed from hostility
toward the black bag to curiosity
and finally to friendship.”
Zajonc’s groundbreaking paper,
Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure,
was published in The Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology
in 1968. Zajonc’s paper describes a
series of experiments in which he
showed participants a sequence of
random images—geometric shapes,
Chinese symbols, paintings, and
pictures of faces—that were flashed
in front of them so rapidly that they
were unable to discern which were
shown repeatedly. When subjects
were later asked which images they
preferred, they consistently chose
the ones to which they had been
most frequently exposed, although
they were not consciously aware of
this fact. What Zajonc seemed to
have discovered was that familiarity
brings about an attitude change,
breeding affection or some form of
preference for the familiar stimulus.

See also: Leon Festinger 166–67 ■ Edward B. Titchener 334 ■ Stanley Schachter 338

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

This increases with exposure: the

greater your number of exposures

to something, the more affection

you will feel toward it. To put it

simply, “the more you see it, the

more you like it.”

Researchers into the mere

exposure phenomenon since Zajonc’s

experiment have found that it is

even possible to re-create this effect

using sound rather than images. In

1974, the social psychologist D.W.

Rajecki used fertile chicken eggs

as test subjects, playing tones of

different frequencies to different

groups of eggs before they hatched,

and then playing these tones to

both groups of chicks again after

hatching. Without exception, the

chicks preferred the tones that had

been played to them prenatally.

Preferences are not rational

Zajonc’s findings indicate that this

preference for familiar things is

based purely on the history of

exposure to it, and is not affected

by a person’s expressed personal

beliefs or attitudes. This holds true

even when exposures take place

only on the subliminal level, when

subjects are completely unaware

that they are being presented with

a stimulus. This discovery led to

Zajonc’s claim that “preferences

need no inferences,” meaning that

Zajonc’s 1968 experiment
tested the mere exposure
effect by showing people
slides of symbols with
uneven rates of repetition;
the more frequently someone
saw a symbol, the more
they claimed to like it.

affectionate feeling is not based

on reasoned judgement. This is

contrary to what most of us might

imagine to be the case.

In a paper called Feeling and

Thinking, written in 1980, Zajonc

argued that feelings and thoughts

are actually very independent of

one another. Feelings not only

precede thoughts during a person’s

complex response to a stimulus,

but are actually the most powerful

determinants of a person’s attitudes

and decisions. This paper was widely

debated, and it helped to bring

the study of emotion back to the

forefront of Western psychology,

in part because the theory bears ❯❯

Novelty is commonly

associated with

uncertainty and conflict—

states that are more

likely to produce negative

than positive affect.

Robert Zajonc