Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

by Derek Thompson

This discovery is known as the “mere exposure effect,” or just the “exposure effect,” and it is one of the sturdiest findings in modern psychology. People don’t just prefer friends over strangers or familiar smells over unfamiliar odors. Across hundreds of studies and metastudies, subjects around the world prefer familiar shapes, landscapes, consumer goods, songs, and human voices. People are even partial to the most familiar version of the thing they should know best in the world: their own faces. The human face is slightly asymmetric, which means that a photograph captures a slightly different face than a mirror. People sometimes wince when they see photographs of themselves, and several studies show people prefer the face that they glimpse in a reflection. Does a glassy surface reveal your countenance at its objectively most beautiful? Probably not. It’s just the face you like, because you’re used to seeing it that way. The preference for familiarity is so universal that some think it must be written into our genetic code from back when our ancestors trawled the savanna. The evolutionary explanation for the exposure effect is simple: If you recognize an animal or plant, then it hasn’t killed you yet.

Same with one's own voice