Use the mere exposure effect to improve your social life

The more people are exposed to something the more they tend to like it whether it’s sounds, pictures, or people. You can use this principle to your advantage to improve your social life.

One of my favourite songs is I’m with you by Avril Lavigne. However, it did not start out that way. I remember hearing it for the first time and feeling kind of ‘neutral’ toward it. As I heard it more often, though, my liking for it began to grow until it became the song I love to this day.

My increased liking for this song is a good illustration of the mere exposure effect. The more people are exposed to any kind of stimulus, the more they tend to like it (as long their initial reaction is not strong dislike). The effect applies to songs, pictures, commercials, letters of the alphabet and many other kinds of stimuli including people. It is the latter category on which I will focus in this article. The more we are exposed to people and the more they are exposed to you, liking will tend to increase. I will discuss how you can use this effect to help you build your social network and improve your relationships. I often refer to the mere exposure effect in my work as a Calgary psychologist and a Cochrane psychologist, particularly in couples counselling and in depression counselling when I encourage clients to increase their social interaction to improve their mood.

Use the mere exposure effect to build your social network

The mere exposure effect means that liking increases through familiarity. It is a response built into us as a result of our evolutionary past in which people were more likely to survive if they approached people and other creatures only once they had determined that they were non-threatening. The upshot is that there will initially be some reticence of you toward others and others toward you when you first meet. However, once you see the same people more often liking will tend to naturally increase as you come to see each other as ‘non-threatening.’

You can use the mere exposure effect to improve your social life by scheduling regular activities with people to breed liking through familiarity. I would recommend you pick activities you enjoy such as sports or other interests. The more you are exposed to these people and the more they are exposed to you, your liking for them and their liking for you will tend to increase.

The good thing about mere exposure is that liking tends to increase even without your interacting with or talking to the other people. Simply being around each other increases familiarity which tends to breed liking. If you use your patience to allow the effect to operate, before long you will find yourself liking others and being liked as a result of this familiarity. This will allow for you to form friendships and other close relationships naturally and easily.

Use the mere exposure effect to improve your relationships

One way of improving your relationships is to get more exposure within them. For example, you may be able to turn one or more casual acquaintances into close friendships by having more contact. Your relationships with work colleagues can also be improved through greater contact which facilitates the mere exposure effect.

The stumbling block for many people in taking these steps is that we are less likely to want to seek out interactions with people for whom are feelings are neutral rather than positive. A way to overcome this obstacle and schedule these interactions is to remind yourself that greater contact with the person will allow the mere exposure effect to operate so that your feelings toward the person should change from neutral to positive. To convince yourself of this phenomenon, consider those people who are your closest friends and how they became your closest friends. It’s very likely that you became close friends through repeated contact which allowed the mere exposure effect to operate so that your feelings toward each other gradually changed from neutral to positive the more time you spent around them.

Try to avoid overexposure

Although the tendency is for greater exposure to people to produce liking, too much exposure—especially within a short period of time—can lead to overexposure which may lead to disliking as a result of boredom. This creates the need for you to perform a balancing act in your interactions with certain people.

That is, if you like someone—perhaps partly because of the mere exposure effect—you may naturally want to spend as much time around that person as possible. However, doing so may unfortunately lead both of you to like each other less because of overexposure to each other. Therefore, you may want to consider spacing out the amount of time you have between your interactions with each other as this has been found to prevent or delay the point of overexposure. Interestingly, I do this ‘rationing of exposure’ to songs I like after having found my liking for songs decreased when I listened to them so often that I reached the overexposure point with them.

May you use the power of the mere exposure effect to your benefit,

-Dr. Pat