Madonna or Don McLean? The effect of order of exposure on relative liking

Abstract

While many studies have shown that exposure frequency affects consumer attitudes and preferences, the current paper provides evidence that exposure order also does so. Three studies show that people like stimuli to which they are first exposed better than later encountered, similar stimuli. Controlling for exposure frequency and duration, individuals prefer the version of a song they heard first to a version they heard later and images they saw first to mirror images they saw later. In addition, our results suggest that perceived originality contributes to the preference for a first encountered stimulus. Our results are discussed in relation to research on order effects in sequential rating formats.

Memory Enhances the Mere Exposure Effect

“…Against this background, marketing-based mere exposure research has supported a number of different theories; including, for example, uncertainty reduction (Lee, 1994), hedonic fluency (Fang, Singh, and Ahluwalia, 2007), and perceptual fluency/attribution (Lee, 2002;Shapiro, 1999). But it is the latter of these that appears to underpin most treatments of the MEE in the wider marketing literature (e.g., Auty and Lewis, 2004;Chatterjee, 2008;Matthes, Schemer, and Wirth, 2007;Pandelaere, Millet, and den Bergh, 2010). This, it seems plausible, stems from the traditional dominance of this explanation in psychological research (see Butler and Berry, 2004).…”

Aesthetic principles and cognitive emotion appraisals: How much of the beauty lies in the eye of the beholder?

“…This will in turn, lead them to prefer a high level of harmony in such designs as the aesthetic information from these designs is easier to process (Reber, Schwarz & Winkielman, 2004). Further, Pandelaere, Millet, and Van den Bergh (2010) in this issue suggest that the ease of processing aesthetic information can have an important bearing on consumers’ preference for a product. Thus, we posit that high typicality and low harmony will create a high level of stimulation and that consumers will prefer moderate, more balanced levels of aesthetic stimulation:…”

I like those glasses on you, but not in the mirror: Fluency, preference, and virtual mirrors

“…22Using other unfamiliar stimuli (e.g., a novel landscape image A and its mirror image B), Pandelaere, Millet, & Van den Bergh (2010) observed that people prefer the one to which they are first exposed over the one they encounter later, even when exposure frequency and duration are controlled for. This raises the possibility that order effects may also be observed with exposures to unfamiliar faces.…”