Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Attitudes Form and Change?
Track the distinction between encountering something, recognizing it, and liking it.
Why you’re reading it. Introduce formation through experience while keeping the explanatory claims open to challenge.
A question to consider. How would you test whether liking a familiar tune reflects repeated exposure rather than choosing to hear music you already liked?
Why this reading
Can repetition change liking without a persuasive argument? Zajonc uses mere exposure to argue about the relationship between evaluation and recognition.
Before you read
Mere exposure means encountering a stimulus repeatedly without an explicit reward. Valence means how positive or negative it feels. Recognition, familiarity, and liking are separate outcomes.
Read for
- Distinguish frequency–liking correlations from experiments that manipulate repetition.
- Examine what the awareness measures can establish.
- Separate the reported effects from the proposed safety-signal explanation.
Consider afterwards
- If repeated images become better liked without better recognition, which explanations remain possible?
Editorial context
This is an influential theoretical interpretation, not proof that evaluation requires no cognitive processing. Its mechanism remains a proposal. Montoya and colleagues' later synthesis reports an inverted-U pattern under some conditions, qualifying any simple claim that more repetition always increases liking.