Psychology - Do Warnings Protect against the mere-exposure-effect? (Study)

The last study I want to present to you is a study by Feng, Singh and Aluvalia published in 2007 in the Journal of Consumer Research and its title is an examination of different explanations for the mere exposure effect. And what is so interesting about this study is that they investigated whether it's possible to diminish the mere exposure effect by warning people, by telling them beware there's something going on here. To do this they conducted two experiments. The first one was in a way a pretest to establish that it's possible with their experimental manipulation to create a mere exposure effect and therefore they had 232 students from the University of Kansas that were asked to read a five-page article about online education on a computer and while they read this article banner advertising was presented. So again it's quite close to what's happening when you are reading on a website. You are concentrated on the text and above there is this banner advertising for example digital cameras. And that's exactly what happened in the study as well. While the participants read this five-page article about online education which they had to read really concentrated because afterwards there would be some questions about it. There was this banner advertisement for a brand called Pretek and this brand was obviously a brand for digital cameras because also pictures from digital cameras were presented on this banner. Again they had three groups. In one group this banner was presented five times. In another group the banner was presented 20 times. And in a third group it was completely absent. So this was the control group. Afterwards the participants were asked some questions about the text and they were shown this Pretek advertisement again. But now they were asked how they would react to this kind of advertisement. So on a scale from one to nine what is your feeling about this advertisement? Is it good or not so good? And it turned out in line with the predictions of the mere exposure effect when they had seen this advertisement for 20 times before Pretek advertisement was rated better than when they had seen it just for five times or when they had seen it not at all. What is especially important is that they also conducted a recognition test in which they showed the participants the brands Pretek and the brand Relizes and they were asked well which of these brands did you see when you read the text? And their guessing was no better than chance. So this was the pretest. In the second experiment which was quite similar they used the same materials they changed some aspects. First of all they presented the banner advertisement only five times. So the 20 presentation group did no longer exist and in the control group again the banner advertisement was not present. The second thing they changed was the number of subjects. This time they even had 304 subjects. And all these participants this time did not only read this text but they were also listening to meditative music via headphones. Now you might say huh why did they listen to music? Well there were two effects of this music. First of all the participants were even more distracted so they paid even less attention to the banner advertisement which can be seen at the results of the recognition tests. And the second idea was that this time they wanted to warn the participants. But they didn't want to say beware of the mere exposure effect which is the more often you see something the more you like it. They were looking for a suitable way to warn of the of the effects of the mere exposure effect without telling about the mere exposure effect. So one group of the participants were told well beware because the music might have led to a better processing fluency. So every stimulus you see now might be processed in a better way. The second group was told well beware the music could have led to positive emotions. So if you feel really good now it might be because of the music. The third group was told a general warning. They were told beware the music could affect your judgment. And the fourth group was the control group. In this group the participants were not warned at all. It turned out that for this group the same results occurred like in the first experiment. Participants who were exposed five times had a better attitude towards pre-tech than participants who were exposed zero times. Interestingly the general warning telling the participants well the music could affect your judgment had no effect. But those warnings that aimed at the supposed mechanisms of the mere exposure effect which are the improved processing fluency and the positive effect, those warnings were effective. So people who were told beware the music might have led to better processing fluency or to positive effect, for those groups no mere exposure effect was visible. So in a way the good news is that if you know about the mere exposure effect there seems to be a chance not to be affected by this effect. That's it for today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. See you next time.