On February 14, 1887, forty-seven of France's most celebrated artists published a letter of protest on the front page of Le Temps. The target: a construction project rising from the Champ de Mars. They called it "useless and monstrous." A "hateful column of bolted sheet metal." A "gigantic black factory chimney" that would crush Notre-Dame, dwarf the Louvre, and humiliate the Arc de Triomphe with its barbaric bulk.
The signatories included composer Charles Gounod, architect Charles Garnier, writer Guy de Maupassant, and Alexandre Dumas fils. These were the arbiters of taste in the world's cultural capital. Their collective judgment: the Eiffel Tower would disfigure Paris irreparably.
Two years later, the tower opened. Nearly two million people climbed it during the 1889 World's Fair. Gounod and painter Ernest Meissonier publicly withdrew their opposition. Maupassant reportedly ate lunch in the tower's restaurant on a regular basis, the only spot in Paris where he could avoid looking at the thing he claimed to despise. By the early twentieth century, the structure those artists called a "disgrace" had become the symbol of Paris itself.
They saw the same tower. What changed was how many times they saw it.
The Why
The Mere Exposure Effect describes a consistent finding in psychology: people develop preferences for things simply because they encounter them repeatedly. No persuasion required. No quality assessment needed. Familiarity alone breeds liking.
Robert Zajonc documented this phenomenon in his 1968 paper "Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure" at the University of Michigan. He showed participants nonsense words, Chinese-like characters, and photographs of men's faces at varying frequencies. The result held across every category: the more often people saw something, the more positively they rated it. Participants who viewed certain characters twenty-five times rated them far more favorably than characters shown only once or twice, even when they could not consciously remember seeing them before.
The preference curve follows a specific shape. The first few exposures produce the steepest gains. Returns diminish around ten to twenty repetitions. Excessive repetition eventually triggers irritation. The sweet spot exists between unfamiliar and overplayed.
Twelve years later, Zajonc proposed what he called "affective primacy": the idea that emotional reactions precede and often bypass cognitive evaluation. You like something before you decide whether to like it. The preference forms first. The rationalization follows. This explained why his 1968 participants developed preferences for stimuli they could not consciously recall encountering. The process operates beneath awareness, in circuitry older than language.
For ancestral humans, unfamiliar stimuli carried risk. A new sound in the forest might mean predator. A strange plant might mean poison. Repeated exposure without negative consequences signals safety. The brain rewards recognition with warmth.
The Mere Exposure Effect operates across every domain where preference matters. In music, listeners who hear an unfamiliar piece seven times rate it higher than listeners who hear it once, regardless of genre or complexity. In politics, candidates with greater name recognition win elections against more qualified unknowns. In food science, children who rejected broccoli on first encounter accepted it after eight to fifteen tastings without coercion. The same mechanism that turned a hated iron tower into a national treasure turns a strange flavor into a favorite meal. What feels like taste is often just accumulated contact.
