Attitudinal Effects of First Exposure
Mario Pandelaere, Kobe Millet, Bea R.H. Van den Bergh · RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2011
Drawing on an analogy with the phenomenon of imprinting, the current paper demonstrates a first exposure effect: People favor stimuli they encounter first. We obtain this effect for relative ratings of music samples (studies 1 and 2) and of pictures of landscapes (study 3) and for absolute ratings of abstract paintings (study 4). In all studies, we eliminated a mere exposure explanation by either statistically controlling for differences in familiarity or by controlling for exposure frequency and/or duration. While several studies have shown that a first stimulus may receive more extensive processing then subsequent ones, the current studies demonstrate that this may result in enhanced liking for the first stimulus.