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Understand the Mere-Exposure Effect: How Vulnerable Are You to Fake News and Urban Legends? with Derek Thompson, Senior Editor, The Atlantic and Author, Hit Makers
Mere-Exposure Effect
One of the oldest findings in psychology history is the “mere exposure effect.” And the mere exposure effect says that the mere exposure of any stimulus to you, biases you toward that stimulus. So, children who grow up eating more spicy foods tend to like more spicy foods. People who grow up with their parents listening to more jazz, end up liking more jazz timbers and more jazz styles. That we have a bias toward familiarity. And I think that this is true, both for insignificant tastes like for food and music, and for profound political tastes. There’s some evidence that children who grow up in multicultural neighborhoods tend to be much less racist or have much less racial opinions, than children who grow up in more monochromatic neighborhoods. Again, this is a bias toward familiarity.
And I think it’s very important to think about familiarity bias as a news consumer, because there’s lots of evidence that shows that the mere repetition, the mere exposure, of news to us biases us toward thinking that that news item is true. This is often how fake news works or how urban legends can start, that you hear the piece of gossip once and you dismiss it as mere gossip. You hear it twice. Okay. Maybe now it’s stuck in your head. You hear it from four different people at four different times, suddenly that gossip becomes truth because, once it becomes fluent, once it becomes memorable, you tend to conflate fluency, familiarity, and veracity, fact.
There was one study that essentially looked at this with scientific facts. They told a bunch of older and younger people that shark cartilage was good for arthritis. And they labeled this fact as false for most of the people that they were showing the fact to. And immediately active the study, they asked people, “Is shark cartilage good for arthritis?” And both young and old participants said, “No. We know that it’s not good for arthritis. That fact was listed as false when we saw it in the study.” But several weeks later, they called back the participants and they asked them, old and young, “Is shark cartilage good for arthritis?” The young participants remembered that the fact was listed as false, but the older participants who had worse implicit memory were more likely to say, “Oh, well, that sounds familiar. And therefore, I think it’s true.”
And so, this is one of the big reasons why it’s difficult to myth bust on television or myth bust in journalism, because sometimes the mere repetition of that myth biases audiences toward thinking that it’s true because we have a familiarity bias. We cannot help ourselves from conflating that which is familiar, from that which we think is more likely to be true.