Give It Time: Why New Things Grow on Us

The first time you hear a new album by a band you love, it can be a letdown. The new phone layout feels wrong for a week. The neighbor's new paint color looks loud. Then, somewhere along the way, it stops bothering you. A month later, you might like it better than what came before.

Psychologists have studied that shift for more than half a century. They call it the mere-exposure effect: simply encountering something repeatedly tends to make us feel more positively toward it, even when nothing else about it changes.

It's worth understanding, because so much of what's worth doing in the second half of life arrives as something new and slightly unappealing.

The experiment

The classic work came in 1968 from Robert Zajonc, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan. He opened his monograph with a newspaper story about a student who attended a speech class for two months inside a large black bag. According to the professor, the other students' attitude toward "the Black Bag" moved from hostility to curiosity and finally to friendship.

Zajonc then tested the idea in the lab. In one study, people were shown twelve made-up, seven-letter "Turkish" words and asked to pronounce them. Some words came up only once or twice. Others came up five, ten or 25 times. Each showing lasted about two seconds.

Afterward, participants were told the words were Turkish adjectives and asked to guess whether each one meant something good or bad. They couldn't know. But the more often they had seen a word, the more favorably they tended to rate its meaning. Zajonc repeated the study with Chinese-looking characters that participants couldn't read or pronounce, and found the same pattern.

Nothing about the words changed. Only their familiarity did.

Is it real?

One clever study can be a fluke. This one wasn't. In 1989, Robert Bornstein published a meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin covering 208 experiments from 134 published articles in the two decades after Zajonc. The exposure effect held up across words, pictures, faces, sounds and real objects.

Just as useful, the research maps the limits:

• More isn't always better. Bornstein found that the number of exposures shapes the size of the effect, and very long runs of repetition don't keep adding liking.
• Boredom pushes back. A 1990 study by Bornstein and colleagues found that boredom acts as a brake. Something simple, repeated relentlessly, can start to wear thin.
• Starting point matters. The effect is most reliable for things that start out new and neutral. If you genuinely dislike something from the start, repetition is much less likely to win you over.
• Familiar isn't the same as good. The effect works on preference, not quality. That's partly why advertisers repeat jingles. Liking something because you've seen it a lot says nothing about whether it's actually the better choice.

Why this matters more as the years go on

Many of us have built a life that runs smoothly on familiar things: the same route, the same software, the same playlist, the same Saturday. That's not a flaw. It's often the reward of having figured out what works.

But it also means new things start at a disadvantage. The new phone, the new music at church, a new strength routine, the new town after a move: each arrives without the warm glow of familiarity that its predecessor spent years earning. Our first reaction, "I don't like this," may be partly a reaction to its newness.

There's a related pattern in research on food. In a 1982 study, Leann Birch and Diane Marlin found that two-year-olds came to prefer unfamiliar foods they had tasted more often. Adults aren't toddlers, but plenty of us know the feeling of a food, a sound or a habit we resisted and later came to enjoy.

None of this means every new thing deserves a place in your life. It means the first impression is a poor judge.

Try this: the five-honest-tries rule

The next time something new feels off-putting, whether it's a piece of technology, a style of music, a workout, a food or a change at work, try this before you decide:

• Give it several real tries. Five is a reasonable number. Not five minutes; five separate occasions, spread over a week or two.
• Keep the tries short and spaced. Listen to two new songs a day, not the whole album on repeat.
• Start with things you feel neutral about. If you truly hate something, repetition probably won't fix it. Save your effort for the "not sure yet" category.
• Ask a better question at the end. Not "Do I like it yet?" but "Is this actually better, or just familiar?" That question cuts both ways. It can rescue a good new habit, and it can expose an old one you've kept only out of comfort.

Experience gives you something younger people don't have: a long record of things that once felt strange and now feel like home. Most of what you love today was once new to you too.

Sources

• Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Monograph Supplement, 9(2, Pt. 2), 1–27. DOI · Full text (PDF).pdf)
• Bornstein, R. F. (1989). Exposure and affect: Overview and meta-analysis of research, 1968–1987. Psychological Bulletin, 106(2), 265–289. DOI
• Bornstein, R. F., Kale, A. R., & Cornell, K. R. (1990). Boredom as a limiting condition on the mere exposure effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(5), 791–800. DOI
• Birch, L. L., & Marlin, D. W. (1982). I don't like it; I never tried it: Effects of exposure on two-year-old children's food preferences. Appetite, 3(4), 353–360. DOI80053-6)