The Mere Exposure Effect
Same thing, twice. Once brand new. Once after you have seen it many times.
What this is
Eight items in four hidden pairs. Each pair is the same stimulus, twice: a face, an abstract symbol, a song, a brand name. Once it is brand new to the people judging it. Once they have seen it many times, often without paying any attention. The pairs are not adjacent, they are scattered. For each scenario you move a slider predicting the average liking people would report, where 50 is perfectly neutral.
At the end I compute your Mere Exposure Gap: the average liking you predicted for the repeated-exposure scenarios minus the average for the single-exposure scenarios. A gap near zero says you believe taste is intrinsic and repetition is noise. A gap near 18 puts you inside fifty years of data.
A note before we start
Since Zajonc (1968) JPSP Monograph vol 9, the finding has been blunt: mere repeated exposure to a stimulus, with no reward and no new information, is enough on its own to raise how much you like it. Bornstein (1989) Psychological Bulletin vol 106 pooled 208 experiments at r near .26, and Montoya et al (2017) Psychological Bulletin vol 143 updated it to 268. The unsettling part: Kunst-Wilson & Zajonc (1980) Science vol 207 flashed shapes for one millisecond, too fast to consciously see, and subjects still preferred them without being able to recognize them at all. The liking can form below the waterline of awareness.
No login. No data leaves your browser. Eight scenarios, roughly four minutes.