One of the joys of living in Austin is that you get to hear a lot of great music. It seems like there is another great concert being announced every day. It is impossible to go to everything, and it is even more difficult to keep up with all of the new music being released.
When you go to a concert, it is common for the band to play a lot of new material to introduce a CD they are promoting. But the crowd always seems to go wild for the song that has been on the radio recently.
This new song may not be the best one that the band plays, but it is familiar to most of the audience. Research going back 50 years has shown that people have a preference for things that are familiar over those that are unfamiliar. Bob Zajonc (prounounced Zie-ons) called this the mere exposure effect. That is, just hearing a song once makes you like it better than you liked it the first time you heard it.
(As an aside, the clearest case of mere exposure for me came in the summer of 1988. I went to see the movie Ghostbusters and the first time the theme song by Ray Parker Jr. came on, I thought it may very well have been the dumbest song I ever heard. By the end of the summer, because it was played so often on the radio, I came to like it.)
A paper by Marieke de Vries, Rob Holland, Troy Chenier, Mark Starr, and Piotr Winkielman in the March, 2010 issue of Psychological Science looks at the situations in which mere exposure fails.
They capitalized on the observation that when people learn new categories, the average member of the category (called the prototype) is usually seen as more familiar than items that are technically members of the category, but are distant from this average. For example, robins are close to the bird prototype while buzzards are further from the prototype.
In this study, people learned categories in which the members were patterns of dots on a computer screen. This method has the advantage that what people are learning about cannot be influenced by their experiences before coming to the experiment. The categories had a prototype pattern of dots on the screen. The various category members seen throughout the experiment involved patterns of dots in which the prototype was altered by moving each of the dots in a random direction. Previous work shows that this technique allows people to learn categories in which the prototype used to generate the category members is seen as most prototypical.
In this study, before learning the categories, people either wrote about a happy memory or a sad memory. Other research shows that this task effectively influences people's mood. They are happy after writing about a happy memory and sad after writing about a sad memory.
After learning the categories, people saw the prototype as well as a new category member that was distant from the prototype. They rated how much they liked each of these items. When people were put in a sad mood, the usual mere exposure effect was found. People liked the prototype more than the new category item. When they were in a happy mood, though, there was no effect of familiarity at all. People liked the prototype and the new item equally well.
An interesting aspect of this study is that they also measured electrical activity from the muscles on people's faces. It is possible to detect when people are feeling positively by measuring near the muscle on the cheek that people use to smile. This technique is called a facial EMG (or electromyography). This measure showed that when people were in a sad mood, the prototype revealed more electrical activity than the new category item in the smile muscle (the Zygomaticus for those who are interested). People in a happy mood showed no real difference between the prototype and the new category member for the facial EMG.
What does all this mean?
Familiarity probably increases how much you like things, because it is a signal of safety. With any new thing, there is some chance it is dangerous, but familiar things are more likely to be safe.
A sad mood may signal to you that you think the environment around you is not safe, while a happy mood may signal to you that you think the environment is safe. Familiarity is particularly valuable when you think the world may be unsafe. When you think the world is basically a safe place, then you may be more willing to explore even those things that are unfamiliar.
Finally, there is more going on with songs than just familiarity. When I hear the Ghostbusters theme song now, I like it not just because it is familiar, but also because it brings back memories of that summer.
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