AFTER 1971 Psychologists T.T. Faw and D. Pien find that adults and children prefer unfamiliar This preference is emotional and line drawings and patterns to forms on a subconscious level before familiar ones. a person is even aware of it. 1989 Robert Bornstein finds that the mere exposure effect is strongest when unfamiliar stimuli are presented briefly. The more you see it, the more you like it. Until the middle of the 20th this end, he performed a seminal 1910, described the “glow of century, social scientists experiment in 1968 that led to his warmth” and feeling of intimacy tended to base their discovery of the “mere exposure that a person experiences in the explanations of human behavior effect,” which is arguably his best- presence of something familiar. on environmental factors. However, known contribution to the field of However, Titchener’s hypothesis the Polish-born psychologist Robert social psychology. was rejected at the time, and the Zajonc believed that to develop a idea faded into relative obscurity.
