The mere exposure instruction effect: Mere exposure instructions influence liking

The mere exposure effect refers to the well-established finding that people evaluate a stimulus more positively after repeated exposure to that stimulus. We investigated whether a mere exposure effect can occur also when participants are not repeatedly exposed to a stimulus, but are merely instructed that one stimulus will occur frequently and another stimulus will occur infrequently. We report seven experiments showing that (1) mere exposure instructions can influence implicit stimulus evaluations as measured with an Implicit Association Test, personalized Implicit Association Test, or Affect Misattribution Procedure, but not with an Evaluative Priming Task, (2) mere exposure instructions can influence explicit evaluations, as measured with an evaluative rating task, and (3) the effect of mere exposure instructions on stimulus evaluations depends on participants’ memory of which stimulus will be presented more frequently. We discuss how these findings inform us about the mental processes that underlie instruction-based and experience-based mere exposure effects and the boundary conditions of these effects.