The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything

In the 1960s, the psychologist Robert Zajonc conducted a series of experiments where he showed subjects nonsense words, random shapes, and Chinese-like characters and asked them which they preferred. In study after study, people reliably gravitated toward the words and shapes they’d seen the most. Their preference was for familiarity.

This discovery was known as mere-exposure effect, and it is one of the sturdiest findings in modern psychology. Across hundreds of studies and meta-studies, subjects around the world prefer familiar shapes, landscapes, consumer goods, songs, and human voices.

In mere-exposure studies, the preference for familiar stimuli is attenuated or negated entirely when the participants realize they’re being repeatedly exposed to the same thing. For that reason, the power of familiarity seems to be strongest when a person isn’t expecting it.

The reverse is also true: A surprise seems to work best when it contains some element of familiarity.

Eureka moments are a force in the academic world as well.

Scientists and philosophers are exquisitely sensitive to the advantage of ideas that already enjoy broad familiarity.

In 2014, a team of researchers from Harvard University studied about sort of proposals that were most likely to win funding from prestigious institutions such as the National Institutes of Health: familiar proposals or extremely novel ones?

• Most-novel proposals got the worst ratings.
• Exceedingly familiar proposals fared a bit better.
• The highest evaluation scores went to submissions that were deemed slightly new.

In Silicon Valley, where venture capitalists also sift through a surfeit of proposals, many new ideas are promoted as a fresh spin on familiar successes.

Optimal newness in names: Most parents prefer first names for their children that are common but not too common, optimally differentiated from other children's names.

This helps explain how names fall in and out of fashion.