In his 1968 paper, “Attitudinal effects of mere exposure.”, Robert Zajonc asked participants to rate their liking for various things such as geometric shapes, Japanese pictograms, Chinese characters, and nonsense words in a made-up language. To his surprise, he found that the mere frequency of exposure to these items, even if it was only for a fraction of a second, greatly influenced people’s liking for them. This phenomenon, known as the mere exposure effect, has been exploited by the advertising industry to shape public desire and drive consumer behavior.