The more you hear it, the more you like it

It's called the mere exposure effect and it states that the more you are exposed to a certain message, the more familiar it will become and therefore you will like it more than something you have never heard of. This applies to both humans and objects.

The advertising industry is obviously very much interested in this theory, that was discussed in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The more you see a person, the more attractive you think he/she is. I mean, you get used to the flaws and tend not to notice them anymore. So, just hanging around the person you want to be noticed by, might get you something. I am kidding... actually, I am more interested in the psychological and commercial part of this theory. You can actually learn to like, in time, even unpleasant things, like prisoners miss prison, just because they are familiar with that environment and feel safe there.

Some experiments were made on subjects exposed to a picture or a piece of music and they later rated it better than the ones who have never heard of it before. In another experiment (Zajonc) some students were shown chinese signs, as a subliminal message (message that is presented faster than can be perceived consciously by our brain) and they were asked to rate from a range of chinese signs which they thought was good or bad. They choose the signs shown in the subliminal mode as beeing good.

When asked about their reasons for choosing those particular signs, they gave detailed resons for doing so, partially because of rationalization. Rationalization is a psychological term used to describe ways to construct logical justification for a decision that was made through another mental process.

It is the same in advertising, when all the adverts repeat the same message over and over and you begin to like a product even you have never tried it. If you become over exposed you begin to feel irritated and have a negative response and that is why people change the adds.