Ever notice how when you first hear the sickeningly sweet strains of that Miley Cyrus song you've heard approximately 48 times in the last fortnight, you automatically start tapping your foot, maybe even singing along? Then once the chorus kicks in you realize that Miley's antics make you mildly nauseous, but now the song is stuck in your brain like the saccharin pink bubble gum that it is. But initially, in the split second before realization you think, "Hey, I like this song!" Just don't blurt it out to the attractive stranger standing next to you in the elevator, okay?
People more readily like what they find familiar rather than what they perceive to have higher quality. This phenomenon is called the mere-exposure effect, and was first documented by Robert Zajonc in a series of experiments he conducted from the 1960s to the 1980s. One of the experiments identified the mere-exposure effect in people choosing characters from a group including some unfamiliar characters as well as some they had been primed to recognize consciously. The subjects were more likely to pick out the characters they had seen on previous visits. More interestingly, they were also more likely to pick out characters that they had been subliminally primed to see. Flashing the characters extremely quickly on a screen, faster than could be perceived consciously, produced the same mere-exposure effect as consciously seeing those images.
Zajonc took the conclusions one step further speculating that if recognition initially produces warm fuzzies, then novelty must produce fear or avoidance. He observed both this fear effect and that multiple exposures made the stimulus less novel and, therefore, led to less fear.
In Baba Brinkman's 2010 album The Rap Guide to Human Nature, he remixes an old Christian fundamentalist sing-along called There Ain't No Bugs on Me to point out that the lack of exposure to all kinds of culture, and the cultures that proliferate with them, might just be the problem that leads to xenophobia and racism as well as to shingles and measles. People living in large cities are exposed to germs and to ideas. Our bodies produce immune and emotional responses to these in turn. As ideas become more familiar, we become more capable of responding positively to them, instead of with fear.
The final leap I'm willing to make, a triple axel of a leap for some and a small skip for others, is that we can and do inoculate against fear of the unknown, fear of the other, and fear of novelty in the same way we inoculate against measles, mumps, and rubella: by exposure to milder forms of the hair of the same dog that would otherwise bite you. I'm not talking about hangover cures here, but I am talking about one of the most wonderful consequences of living in a place and time that allows us to access novelty of culture, religion, ideas, political views, and especially cat videos in abundance everyday. This constant influx of the new and exciting, combined with the interweb's echo chamber effect means we not only have access to what was novel two weeks ago, but in those 14 days that shiny new idea has become ubiquitous. The special bonus of all this connectivity is that if someone's herd has been exposed to the new idea, they can protect others by having a calm & collected, even accepting, attitude about what's novel for the person who missed last week's dose of culture.
Sorry, friends, but the curve of our existence bends towards tolerating, perchance even liking, that new Miley song!
No comments:
Post a Comment