Journal Entry #6

Journal Entry #6

Mere Exposure Effect

Having a car on campus is definitely one of the bigger luxuries currently in my life as college student. Driving around also allows me to do one of my favorite activities more often – listening to the radio. It is one of the best feelings to be driving down the highway, with the windows rolled down, just listening to the radio blasting as you speed from city to city.

The only problem I run into is that the radio has a tendency to be extremely repetitive. Often you will listen to the same songs over and over. Because several songs are popular with different audiences, the same songs will still appear on multiple stations. That same song could also be classified in several different ways because of the type of music the band produces. For example, the band, Imagine Dragons, released their first single called “It’s Time”. As it rapidly became popular, it appeared on stations like Radio 1045 (Philadelphia’s Alternative), Mix 106.1 (Philadelphia’s 90s, 2K and Today), Q102 (Philadelphia’s Station for All the Hits), as well as HOT 99.5 (DC’s HOTTEST Music) and DC101 (DC’s Rock Station) (all information taken from iHeartRADIO website). Luckily I actually quite like the song “It’s Time”. I was intrigued the first time I heard it and then as I began to hear it more often, I grew to really love it.

However, a new sort of problem arises when I first hear a song on the radio that I find super annoying. Take for example Bruno Mars’ “Locked out of Heaven”. What to me is a superficial song, whose lyrics cannot even make up its ridiculousness, is actually a popular among many radio stations and among my friends. Hearing that blasted on the radio was definitely not exciting. One of the most annoying things when I was trying to avoid that song was when I would quickly flip to another station as soon as I heard the intro, but then realize that the chorus was playing somewhere else. It has once happened to me that I tried to change the station three times trying to get away from a song, but all three were playing it! Whenever this sort of situation happens to me, I usually end up turning off the radio in dismay.

Yet for some reason, I am now able to tolerate “Locked out of Heaven” whenever it plays. After only a few times listening to it, I found that I had learned the rhythm and almost all of the lyrics. I do not even bother changing the station anymore.

This kind of behavior most likely is caused by the mere exposure effect. This is the tendency to like certain stimuli that we have been exposed to repeatedly.

Zanjonc in 1968 did a study in which he tested how favorable American subjects would be to Chinese characters after repeated exposure. He found that subjects that had been exposed to certain characters with more frequency liked those characters more. Subjects did not even need to necessarily recognize the characters in order to produce this favorability. The exposure could be done subliminally and still gave the same results.

My own situation reminds me of the movie “Easy A” starring Emma Stone. In one part of the movie, the main character, Olive, gets a card that sings “Pocket Full of Sunshine” every time she opens it. The first time she hears it played aloud, she is disgusted by the song. Yet as the days go on, Olive cannot get enough of the song. What starts out as just playing it while she is doing monotonous activities turns into her dancing to it in seemingly all of her free time over the next few days (i.e., when painting her nails and while in the shower).

 Pocket Full of Sunshine clip  

At the time of watching the movie my friends and I all laughed because we all know what it is like to go through that experience. I personally, just went through it again. Other applications of the mere exposure effect are being enacted on us every day. Seeing the same car commercial over and over throughout the time in which you are watching a television commercial makes you more favorable to that brand of car. Repeatedly telling students the positive aspects and necessity of donating to the annual fund of a certain college is another way in which a person can utilize the mere exposure effect. I think the ways in which the effect is used is pretty fascinating. It is quite a sneaky way of getting someone to like something that you also favor.