Psychology: The Mere-Exposure-Effect

[Music] one weakness of the two studies we've just been talking about certainly is that the number of exposures was not systematically manipulated but don't worry this has been done very often in formal studies about the mere-exposure effect for example in the very nice study by Robert sayang and colleagues in this study one thousand and one hundred and forty-one subjects from two Michigan universities the Michigan State University and the University of Michigan participated but for sure at the beginning they did not really know that they were part of an experiment because all the experimenters did was to place Turkish words five Turkish words sorry for my pronunciation I'm not Turkish but I will try they placed the words kadhi Agha sorry cheek Bhavani nan soma and ik t Tov in the university newspapers so of course in a university newspaper you can place advertisement and the researchers did not place advertisement but they just placed these five Turkish words but with different frequencies so one word was placed just one the second word was placed two times the third five times the fourth ten times and the fifth twenty five times they did this over the course of several weeks and which is very important the words let's say for example sorry cheek the words that were placed most often in the newspaper in the Michigan State University was the one that was placed the least often in the newspaper of the other University so the results cannot be explained by well this word is probably more likeable from begin on after several weeks had gone by they conducted a little survey as part of a seemingly linguistic research the participants only had to decide whether the words had a good or a bad meaning so for example sorry chick what do you think does it mean something positive or does it mean something negative the results were completely in line with the predictions of the mere-exposure effect the more often the participants were exposed to a word they didn't know the meaning of the more often they thought well it probably means something good and these effects have been replicated numerous times not only with turkish words but also with chinese characters with pictures of people and also with music [Music] you