I could post this in General Chat as this isn't really meant to be a funny thread but General Chat has become a wasteland of megathreads and same old topics. Plus, I'm a funhouse loyalist and I hate seeing that General Chat has a few more posts than the funhouse according to the forum statistics so I'm going to do what I can to even the score and push the funhouse ahead.
With that brief intro done, the point of this thread is learning. A place for posters to just mention an interesting new fact or tidbit they've come across that they thought was pretty neat and want to help pass on that knowledge to others. A chance for us to expand our horizons and broaden our minds and increase our intellectual knowledge. Or maybe not. Who knows? It's NWR, baby!
To kick it off and the reason for this whole topic comes from a book I've been reading called The Psychology Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained. It goes through different branches of psychology and explains some of the big ideas that have been discovered in the process of developing each field. One point in the social psychology field is the idea: The more you see it, the more you like it.
A psychologist named Zajonc conducted an experiment that led to the discovery of the mere exposure effect. What happened was that at a university, in one class, there was a student who attended and was completely enveloped in a black bag. No one in the rest of the class knew who the student might be except for the professor teaching it. This went on for a few months with the professor observing the student's reactions. At first, they were hostile to the black bag person but then eventually became friendly and even protective of this person. It is sort of comparable to an animal that discovers a strange new object in its territory. It may react harshly or hostile to this object, attacking or testing it. But over time when it realizes it poses no threat, it will be softer or indifferent to it. And if something else tries to take that object away, it may then become possessive and want to keep it.
Zajonc did other tests including one where people watched a screen that had random shapes flashed over it. A couple shapes would get flashed more than the others. Afterwards, when people were asked what shapes they preferred, they would always list the ones they saw more of as they had become more familiar to them.
In the end, the implications from this and other experiments conducted by Zajonc is that it is not reason or logic that guide our decisions. Instead we make fast, instinctive, emotion-based decisions before we even have a chance to consider the choice cognitively which means that our logical reasoning merely justifies and rationalizes the decisions we have already made rather than inform the choice in the first place.
And while that may seem to indicate a slam dunk for mass advertising, studies on that are inconclusive. This may be because people have both good and bad associations with familiar companies and all of those associations are brought to mind with frequent exposure leading to greater ambivalence to the advertising of that brand name.
And yet, as interesting as all that is, the real whopper is that not only does exposure influence how a person feels about someone but it can even change the way a person looks over time. Zajonc conducted a study comparing photos of couples taken from their first year of marriage and from their 25th year of marriage and found that couples look more alike after many years of being together. The cause is believed to be empathy. Since human emotion is communicated through facial expressions, they may have begun to mimic each others' expressions in the process of empathizing resulting in similar wrinkle patterns over time. That is crazy!
Anyways, I just found that really neat and wanted to share it. Hopefully someone else appreciated it also. Like I say, feel free to add your own points or discuss what's been said.
Topic: Random Interesting Factoids (Read 1553 times)
