Compare methods

	Mere Exposure Paradigm	Evaluative Priming
Field	Social Psychology	Social Psychology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1968	1986
Originator	Robert Zajonc	Russell H. Fazio and colleagues
Type	Experimental paradigm for attitude formation	Reaction-time implicit attitude paradigm
Seminal source	Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9(2, Pt.2), 1-27.	Fazio, R. H., Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Powell, M. C., & Kardes, F. R. (1986). On the automatic activation of attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50(2), 229-238.
Aliases	Mere Exposure Effect, Familiarity-Liking Paradigm, Exposure-Attitude Paradigm	Automatic Evaluation Task, Fazio Priming Task, Bona Fide Pipeline
Related	3	3
Summary	The mere exposure paradigm, established by Robert Zajonc in 1968, shows that simply being repeatedly exposed to a stimulus, with no reinforcement or even conscious recognition, increases liking for it. In the canonical procedure, participants are exposed to novel stimuli -- unfamiliar ideographs, foreign words, faces, or melodies -- different numbers of times, and then rate how much they like each one; liking rises as exposure frequency rises, typically following a positive, decelerating curve. The effect occurs even when stimuli are presented subliminally and participants cannot recognize them, indicating that familiarity breeds liking through an affective rather than cognitive route. Zajonc's demonstration that 'mere' repeated exposure suffices to shape attitudes became foundational for theories of preference formation, the affect-cognition relationship, and applications from advertising to interpersonal attraction.	Evaluative priming, introduced by Fazio and colleagues in 1986, is the foundational reaction-time paradigm for measuring automatic attitudes. On each trial an attitude object (the prime) is briefly presented and is quickly followed by a clearly positive or negative target word that the participant categorizes as 'good' or 'bad' as fast as possible. When the prime and target share the same valence -- a liked object followed by a positive word -- responses are faster; when they mismatch, responses slow. This congruency effect reveals that merely seeing an attitude object automatically activates its associated evaluation, which then facilitates or interferes with judging the target. Because the attitude is inferred from response speed rather than self-report, evaluative priming gives a window onto spontaneous evaluations and became, in its 'bona fide pipeline' form, an early standard for measuring implicit attitudes including racial prejudice.