Background
The Man Behind The Theory
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Mere Exposure and Advertising Subliminal Advertising Limitations and Future Research
Robert Zajonc developed the mere exposure theory. He published his findings in a 1968 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Zajonc has never been the type of person who restricts himself to a given methodology or paradigm while working on a research problem. Rather, he uses whatever discipline and level of analysis that supports evidence relevant to his research questions (Bargh, 2001). It is his creativity and innovation that led to the development of the mere exposure theory.
The mere exposure theory was so groundbreaking at its time because it claimed that mere exposure to stimuli alone could induce liking (Fiske, 2001).
Zajonc wrote: It has been known for some time that social interaction
enhances the attitudes of interactors toward each other... But it
is not known just what contribution to the relationship between
interaction and attitudes is made by mere exposure on the one
hand, and by the variety of psychologically significant
processes that necessarily accompany mere exposure during
the course of social interaction, on the other (Fiske, 2001).
Using linguistic analyses and experimental manipulations, Zajonc showed that positive affective connotations and positive attitudes correspond with 1) relative word frequency within antonym pairs across four languages; 2) frequency of trait adjectives; 3) frequencies of country and city names; 4) frequencies of scientific occupations; and 5) frequencies of fruits, trees, vegetables, and flowers. Zajonc then showed that experimental manipulation of exposure frequency increased the positive connotations of nonsense words, facial photographs, and Chinese-like word characters (Fiske, 2001).
The mere exposure theory led to further research performed by Zajonc on the idea that affective and cognitive processing systems are separate from each other (Bargh, 2001). He also wanted to determine whether a person had to think about the stimulus before he or she developed a feeling for it.
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