CET-6 Listening Practice: Why Familiar Things Feel Better

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to today's lecture on familiarity and liking. There is an old saying that familiarity breeds contempt. In other words, the better we know something, the less we tend to value it. But does seeing something again and again really make us like it less? In nineteen sixty-eight, the psychologist Robert Zajonc set out to answer this question. He showed volunteers a series of made-up words that sounded vaguely foreign. He also used symbols that resembled Chinese characters, as well as photographs of strangers. Crucially, some items appeared only once, while others were shown as many as twenty-five times. Afterwards, participants guessed whether each word or symbol meant something good or bad. For the faces, they simply rated how much they liked each person. The results were strikingly consistent! The more often an item had been shown, the more positively it was rated. Nothing about the items themselves had changed, only how familiar they were. He called this the mere exposure effect, because exposure alone was enough. However, this does not mean that more exposure is always better. In nineteen eighty-nine, a review of more than two hundred experiments examined the effect. It found that liking usually peaks within ten to twenty exposures. Beyond that point, liking can even decline, perhaps because people simply get bored. Surprisingly, the effect tends to be stronger when people barely notice the item at all! In some studies, shapes flashed too quickly to be recognised were still preferred later. This helps explain why advertisers repeat the same brand name over and over. It may also be why a song we disliked at first can gradually grow on us. Even a classmate who seemed unremarkable at first can become likeable through repeated encounters. For language learners, the lesson is clear: meet new words again and again. The more often you hear them in songs, films and conversations, the less strange they feel. Just vary your materials, so that repetition never turns into boredom. So next time you find yourself liking something new, ask yourself how often you have seen it. Thank you for listening, and see you next week.