mere exposure

The more often you meet a thing, the more you tend to like it — no reasons needed, just the meetings.

Zajonc named the effect in 1968: repeated encounters with a face, a shape, a melody raise liking by themselves (mere-exposure effect, Wikipedia, read 2026-06-11). The likely engine is fluency — each meeting makes the thing easier to process, and the ease is read as warmth. It is the one lever that reliably moves a taste, and it can be pulled on purpose: arranged exposures, paired with something already loved (filed 2026-06-12, in training-a-taste). Its shadow side: it works just as well on falsehoods met often.