Does familiarity breed fondness or just repetition comfort?

The mere exposure effect is the psychological tendency to develop preferences for things simply because we are familiar with them. Hearing a song repeatedly makes you like it more, even if you initially disliked it. Psychologist Robert Zajonc demonstrated this in 1968 through experiments showing people prefer familiar Chinese characters to unfamiliar ones. The effect occurs with minimal conscious awareness—we simply like what we know. This has profound implications for marketing, relationships, and cultural preferences, explaining why repeated exposure increases liking across diverse stimuli.