Richard Moreland

Who they are

The work of Moreland that this site cites is the pair of papers below, both in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. This page records only what the papers and their published records state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

Exposure effects in person perception: Familiarity, similarity, and attraction (1982, with Robert Zajonc). The paper reports two experiments. In the first, faces that were viewed repeatedly were rated as more likeable and as more similar to the raters. The effect of familiarity on perceived similarity was largely explained by changes in attraction. In the second experiment, false information about similarity led people who seemed similar to be rated as more likeable and more familiar, again largely through attraction.

Exposure effects in the classroom: The development of affinity among students (1992, with Scott Beach). The paper is a study in which women working with the researchers attended a large lecture class five, ten or fifteen times over a term, with some not attending. Students later rated photographs of the women, and liking rose with the number of attendances.

Key ideas

Both papers ask what exposure does when the thing seen is a person. The 1982 paper adds perceived similarity to liking and familiarity, and reports that the three moved together. The 1992 paper reports liking that tracked how often a person had been present.

Daniel Kahneman's account of the mere exposure effect rests on words, shapes and faces. Moreland's papers extend the same question to classmates.

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