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What Psychological Fact Made You Think "No Wait, Really"?

Discussion in 'Psychiatry' started by Dr.Scorpiowoman, May 8, 2020.

  1. Dr.Scorpiowoman

    Dr.Scorpiowoman Golden Member

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    This question was originally posted on Quora.com amd was answered by Matthew Wong, Neuroscientist, PhD (Psychiatry)


    My favourite one is probably one I was actually involved in during my undergraduate days.

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    I was doing a course in first year introductory psychology and there was a session during a tutorial where every first year psychology student had to go to a computer lab and run through an online task. The task basically was the following:

    There are a bunch of faces that pop up on a screen. Each time there would be a face and we had to judge the expression. Expressions on the face ranged from neutral to happy and down or distressed. After this phase, we were asked to assess the perceived attractiveness (“liking”) on a scale of 1 to 5 for each face.

    About two weeks later when I was in the tutorial class, the demonstrator handed out some results of the study. This is the part where I thought, “seriously?”.

    The primary and statistically significant result of the study was this:

    The more you see a face, the more likely you are to perceive it to be attractive.

    No way! You see, I had no control over what faces I was shown and I didn’t even know that some faces would pop up multiple times (though I knew that often happened). What I didn’t expect was that the frequency of a face popping up would have an subconscious effect on how we perceived those faces. The experimenters didn’t tell us beforehand that they were testing whether frequency of face presentation translated to perceived liking of that face, irrespective of the actual face itself.

    This effect is known as the Mere Exposure Effect which was first investigated by a guy named Zajonc.

    repeated, unreinforced exposures produce an enhancement in affect toward a stimulus.” (Zajonc, 1968)

    Zajonc R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 9, 1–27. 10.1037/h0025848

    Zajonc did many studies that showed that prior and reinforced exposure increased attractiveness ratings. For example, chickens played musical tones in the egg rated the same type of tones higher than novel and unfamiliar tones after hatching.

    This phenomena explains why they show you ads so frequently on TV of the same thing. They want your brain to subliminally increase affection for the presented stimulus. This extends even to subliminal messages that you aren’t aware of!

    In short the more familiar something is to you, the more likely you are to rate it positively, and this applies to people as well. You tend to like people more as you become more familiar with them (isn’t this a Quora effect as well?), which should make sense. When you first meet someone, you may be apprehensive and unsure about them but there is more security with repeated exposures as you realise they hopefully mean no harm.

    Zajonc suggested that this was a cognition-independent effect and our brain naturally processes perceptual frequency quickly to make a judgment, after which a person then applies rational cognitive justification for their judgments. This is not too dissimilar to why some people have irrational fear of spiders, for instance. We judge the spider first before any rational explanations come into view Steven Caddens. Progressive exposure is of course a common treatment for phobias.

    The Mere Exposure Effect works best when the exposed stimulus is brief and not overdone. Too many repeated exposures of great length can reduce this (a “cognitive” bias override). As an example, we may rate a new song more highly when we listen to it a few times but after many exposures, we may get sick of that song and rate it poorly. Further, novelty is important. The effect is amplified when the stimulus has not been noted before. Thus new companies or products advertised catch attention and perceived liking relative to those we are acquainted with.

    What this means is I need to be very careful. Just because I see a new face, product or Quoran a lot doesn’t mean I should start drooling over them.

    Second to this one was the psychological fact that we tend to walk more slowly in the presence of seniors, and that asking people to step aside in a line because you have to do something will make them more likely to comply than if you provided no reason, even if the reason is pretty crappy (e.g. sorry can I use the copier now, I have pages to copy?). I won’t guarantee that actually works but I’ve heard about it and it seems to make sense (attaching “usefulness” to an inconvenient situation to generate feelings of pity and compassion).

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