Robert F. Bornstein

Who they are

Bornstein's work cited on this site is the 1989 review, which remains one of the standard references for the mere exposure effect. Jonah Berger's Invisible Influence cites it at page 11 for the statement that mere exposure "has actually been shown in hundreds of experiments".

This page records only what the papers and their published records state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

Exposure and affect: overview and meta-analysis of research, 1968-1987 (1989). The paper combined a narrative review with a meta-analysis of the methodological and participant variables that shape the link between exposure and liking. Its abstract reports that the type of stimulus, its complexity, the sequence in which stimuli are presented, the length of each exposure and whether people recognise the stimulus all influence the size of the effect. It discusses the findings against earlier reviews and theories, describes changes to the two-factor model of the effect, and discusses a possible evolutionary basis for it.

Key ideas

The central idea of the review is that the mere exposure effect is real but variable, and that its size depends on how and what people are exposed to. That matters for any application, because a finding about one kind of stimulus or one exposure length does not automatically hold for another.

The two-factor model the paper revisits holds that two processes run together as exposures pile up: growing familiarity, which raises liking, and growing boredom, which lowers it. A 2017 meta-analysis by R. Matthew Montoya and colleagues later found that liking rises and then falls with repetition, an inverted U, for visual stimuli.

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