You Don't Like What's Best. You Like What's Familiar.
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Your preferences feel like choices. Most of them are just things you’ve been around long enough to confuse with taste.
Think about your favorite song. Not the one you’d say at a dinner party to sound interesting. The one you actually listen to on repeat.
The first time you heard it, you probably didn’t love it. Maybe you didn’t even notice it. But it played again. And again. Maybe it was on a playlist or in the background at a coffee shop or someone else’s car. And at some point, without deciding to, you started liking it. By the tenth or fifteenth listen, it felt like it was written for you. You’d call it your taste. But your taste didn’t choose the song. Repetition did. You heard it enough times that your brain started processing it easily, and that ease felt like preference.
In 1968, a psychologist named Robert Zajonc ran a study that explained why this happens. He showed people Chinese characters they’d never seen before. Some characters appeared once. Others appeared up to twenty-five times. Then he asked people which ones they preferred. Every time, people chose the characters they’d seen most often. They had no reason to prefer them. No meaning attached, no aesthetic argument, nothing. They just liked the ones they recognized.
Zajonc called it the mere exposure effect. Your brain likes what it’s seen before, and it likes it more the more it’s seen it. Over 200 studies have replicated this across faces, words, images, sounds, and brands. The finding is always the same: familiarity breeds preference, even when there’s no rational basis for it.
That’s interesting when we’re talking about songs and Chinese characters. It gets uncomfortable when you apply it to the rest of your life.
