Mere Exposure and What Everybody Knows

Students in my Intro to the Psych Major course recently had to read and review a pop psychology book. This is a great assignment, by the way, and I really enjoy reading the papers. If only I didn't have a zillion other things to read: research paper introductions, thesis drafts, articles submitted for publication that I've been asked to review, etc.

Anyway, one student reviewed a book on anger, in which the author made something like the following assertion: "You cannot forgive others until you forgive yourself." In his review, the student was using this critically as an example of something that everyone knows anyway. And of course I've heard this before too and was about to let it pass.

But then I thought, "Why not? Why can't you forgive others until you forgive yourself?"

And I sat there for a few minutes trying to think of any reason that this might be true. Not empirical evidence, mind you. Just any semi-logical, halfway plausible reason for the proposed relationship between other-forgiveness and self-forgiveness. But I couldn't do it. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more meaningless the phrase became.

I suspect that the real reason that this assertion seems obvious--along with the kindred, "You cannot love another until you love yourself"--is just that we've heard them before. There is a phenomenon that research psychologists have termed the "mere exposure effect." Simply having been exposed to a stimulus before (even subliminally) causes that stimulus to be processed more easily, to seem more familiar, to be liked more, and--in the case of assertions--be perceived as more true.

This is making me think of all sorts of other related research-based stuff having to do with the automatic tendency to accept assertions as true and with different ways of processing persuasive messages. But I should probably get back to grading papers.