A lot of straight men1 have an ongoing series of jokes where they “pretend to be gay.” They flirt with each other, slap each other on the butt, spoon each other in bed, et cetera. As an actual gay man, I’ve never viewed this as offensive. I am not sure who they think they are imitating, and to be honest, I don’t think many of them know many (or any) gay men besides me, but this whole routine does not bother me.
In general, it can be pretty funny to flirt with your friends. Sometimes, I’ll flirt with my female friends, and it occasionally leads to some silly situations where people who don’t know me assume I’m in a relationship with one girl and flirting with another girl right in front of her. In their defense, my friends and I sometimes intentionally team up to make people think we're dating, just to mess with them. For example, we might choreograph a whole fake couple argument or hold hands in front of a person we want to mislead. When that person asks one of us what was going on, we can deny that anything is happening between us, which is technically true. The resulting confusion can be pretty hilarious.
Other times, my female friends and I try to come up with phrases that straight men say, so we can “pretend to be straight” as an imitation of how straight guys will “pretend to be gay.” Ironically, this causes us to say a lot of things reminiscent of straight men trying to act gay. When that happens, it means I am a gay man pretending to be straight by pretending to be an exaggerated version of gay.
When we’re going through this routine, a good imitation might involve some goofy statements,
some weird and personal questions,
some general delusion,
or some self-centered nonsense.
(Scioly is short for Science Olympiad)
Image: some context for the employed people who read my blog.
These work as effective jokes for us because a) they are all things we have heard straight men say, usually completely unironically, and b) they all contain some level of detachment from reality. Why are you so worried about whether or not an action is gay? Why do you need to know the details of some random gay guy’s sex life? What do you get from trash-talking some of the most beautiful women on the planet?2 Why do you expect the women around you to just “be baddies” for your personal enjoyment while you don’t even go to the gym more than once a month?
The “Why are there no baddies?” (WATNB) mentality is a very self-centered one. It is about holding everyone else to your strange expectations (“Everyone should be what would make me the happiest: baddies!”)) then being upset and confused when, for some reason, people do not comply with that. At the extreme, this mindset can be found occupying hordes of unwashed gamers crying over the lead character in a video game being 3% more clothed:
Aside from the obvious sexism and delusion that form this mindset, I believe that the WATNB mentality is also partially born from a cognitive bias, one that can influence anyone: the mere-exposure effect.
Part 1: The Mere-Exposure Effect
For an introduction to this series, click here. While reading this, please remember that I am not a professional psychologist; I am just a kid who tries to research things thoroughly and wants to get better at thinking.
The mere-exposure effect, also known as the familiarity principle, is the observation that the more we become familiar with something, the more we tend to like it.
Image: A collectible, cognitive bias trading card, created by me! If you like this post, you are allowed to screenshot it. If you try to screenshot it without liking this post, you will become convinced of the efficacy of homeopathic medicine, the least effective mere-exposure effect possible. Choose your next move wisely…
The mere-exposure effect has been widely studied, replicated, and meta-analysed since it was first demonstrated in an experiment by the psychologist Robert Zajonc in 1968. While Zajonc’s initial experiment only demonstrated that increased exposure to unfamiliar words and characters increased a subject’s positive attitude toward them, experimenters over the years have found appearances of the familiarity principle in a multitude of other places. For example,
One study found that people consistently find faces to be more attractive when exposed to them more, regardless of if these faces were generally rated as low, medium, or high in attractiveness. Another study found that this effect increased with the number of exposures people had to the faces, showing how increased familiarity over time causes people to find someone more attractive.
People consistently prefer looking at their own mirrored image over their true image, while their friends consistently prefer looking at the person’s true image over their mirrored image. People see mirror images of themselves more frequently than their true images, while their friends more frequently see true images of that person, so the study theorizes that people tend to prefer the image of themself they have seen more because of the mere-exposure effect.3
To understand how the mere-exposure effect influences people’s opinions on various products, one study analyzed its impact on several key metrics. They found that the study’s subjects’ ratings of “attractiveness of shapes representing common objects (increased) with (the) rated commonness” of each object, meaning that subjects were more likely to find shapes appealing when they were more familiar with them. Then, they created several fictional products, and after exposing them to subjects, they found that the products were rated more favorably when presented more often, especially when the subjects weren’t consciously aware of their exposure to the product.
The mere-exposure effect can greatly influence people’s voting decisions. In a simulated election, one study found that participants were significantly more likely to vote for candidates whose names appeared in headlines more frequently than candidates whose names did not. However, this only occurred when the name appeared in neutral contexts and did not occur when the name appeared in negative contexts.45
In our initial example, our brutally heterosexual strawman6 experienced the mere-exposure effect by nature of being at a competition where he would only be looking over a crowd quickly for the first time ever to check people for attractiveness. If he had spent more time looking at each person and getting to know them better, it is very possible that he would have found out that he liked many more people there than he initially realized. If there were baddies7, his methodology would have made it much harder for him to find them.
Unfortunately, there are some complications with this conclusion that may affect its certainty. I could not find any studies that talked about how the mere-exposure effect affects how “hot” a body is perceived as; the studies I found only talked about the increasing attractiveness of faces. Perhaps we can try to approach this issue by asking another question:
Does increased lifetime exposure to a certain body type affect people’s attraction to it?
We already know that people tend to like common shapes more than uncommon shapes, as shown by the study related to the mere-exposure effect in advertising, so maybe something similar applies to body types. Do some people have a greater lifetime exposure to certain body types than others? And if so, can we measure how attractive they find those body types to be?
One possible way to test this would be to see if people living today and in the United States are more attracted to larger bodies than they used to be: within the past 50 years, obesity rates in the United States have nearly tripled8. Unfortunately, I can’t find any evidence indicating that the body types people are most commonly attracted to have changed as a result of this. In general, analyses of beauty standards over time tend to focus on who is considered a “sex symbol” and why, rather than taking massive polls to see what people find hot. This means we do not have data to see if people’s attraction to certain body types has significantly changed over time.9
One possible way to show that increased exposure to a body type might be to look at the relationship between people’s preferences and their parents' body types. Without getting too Freudian, multiple studies10 have found a significant correlation between parental body type and sexual preference. However, I am uncertain as to whether or not this can be considered a form of mere-exposure effect: most studies refer to it as “sexual imprinting,” so it may be an unrelated psychological phenomenon.
Given our current evidence, I would estimate that there is about an 80% chance that our “hypothetical” straight man couldn’t find any baddies at the Science Olympiad competition because of the mere-exposure effect. Maybe next time he should double-check.
Part 2: Limitations
Of course, like most biases I have studied so far, the mere-exposure effect has limits to its strength. Despite the fact that a meta-analysis of the studies done on the mere-exposure effect from 1968-1987 found an extremely robust and moderately strong correlation between increased exposure and attractiveness11, some researchers have found weaknesses to the effect under certain circumstances. For example,
While people tend to like odors more as they are exposed to them more frequently, one study found that this generally only applies to odors they originally felt neutral about or liked. People were unlikely to gain a liking for odors they initially disliked.1213
Two different meta-analyses suggest that the potential effects of the familiarity principle may plateau and even decline with too many exposures.
One study attempted to see if yard signs increased votes for a candidate in elections, but failed to find any statistically significant effect. Another study attempted to see if convincing people to follow a candidate on Twitter made them more or less likely to vote for the candidate, but it found mixed results.
The longer someone is exposed to a stimulus, the less of a mere-exposure effect they seem to have. Most benefits come from exposures of less than a second. Additionally, the effect is stronger when people do not consciously recognize the stimulus, and when they are being tested for it much later than their initial exposure.
One common saying goes, “familiarity breeds contempt.” Despite the familiarity principle, there is some truth to the idea that sometimes we like things less when we get to know them more. One group of researchers calls our liking of the unknown “The Lure of Ambiguity,” and they find that when people learn that they do not share some traits with others, they are less likely to like them as much. This effect occurs under interesting statistical situations: even if two groups of people have an equal percentage of shared traits with each other, the group of people where the two people have more unshared traits is less likely to like each other as much. For example, if two people have 2 shared traits and two unshared traits, on average, they will like each other more than two people who have four shared traits and four unshared traits. Additionally, when people learned about unshared traits earlier on, they were more likely to interpret future evidence as evidence of dissimilarity, something the researchers call the “cascading nature of dissimilarity.” The researchers say that these findings demonstrate an important caveat to the mere-exposure effect: it is more likely to work when people do not gain information with the additional exposures.
Reflecting on our discussion in the previous section about body type exposure and attraction, it seems unlikely that the mere-exposure effect is what causes people to develop attraction toward certain body types, considering its tendency to plateau. However, this does not provide evidence to counter the claim that a WATNB guy partially holds his mindset because of the mere-exposure effect.
Part 3: Mastery
When it comes to mastering the mere-exposure effect in my own life, there are several things I can improve on because of my knowledge of the bias. For one thing, I can recognize that I experience the bias, and it irrationally informs my opinion on some things. When I want to decide if a picture of me is good or not, I can ask a friend for their input, and I can recognize that my discomfort with some photos is related to being unused to seeing myself that way.14
If repeated subconscious exposure makes people think someone is more attractive, perhaps they could use that to their advantage in gaining social status. As I established in my post on the halo effect, attractive people have power. They can more easily persuade others to do things for them that they want done. I would imagine that the familiarity principle would not make an enormous difference in someone’s popularity, but I also think that a person who people generally like and are familiar with would have much more influence than someone completely unknown. In conclusion, it’s good to go places and be seen?15
Another thing I can keep in mind is the cascading dissimilarity bias discussed toward the end of the limitation section. When assessing how similar I am to someone else, I should intentionally focus on our positive similarities, rather than our negative differences. This can help me avoid irrationally distancing myself from someone. Additionally, because similarity helps create better friendships, focusing on our similarities can help me build better friendships. Perhaps this is obvious advice, but a reminder can’t hurt16, especially given the context of the cascading dissimilarity bias.
Part 4: Bonus Note
I was curious what ChatGPT would come up with when I asked it to make a list of jokes related to this post. They’re so awful and nonsensical that they’re some of the funniest things I have seen recently17. I hope you enjoy them!
Oh god, ChatGPT doesn’t understand what it means to expose yourself to someone lmaooooooo
I can’t say a textbook has ever looked sexy to me, but maybe it would to an LLM. Who knows?
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please give it a like. If you would be interested in learning about how to master other cognitive biases, you can subscribe to my Substack to receive emailed notifications every time I create a new post. Also, if you want to pretentiously tell someone they are making a silly-but-human mistake in their thinking, feel free to share this post with them. We all know someone we think could use it… (this is ironic because of the blind spot bias)
From what I can tell, this appears to be a fairly worldwide phenomenon in countries that are decently LGBTQ+ accepting. Here’s an o3 summary and another link I found (89% of straight men!) related to the cross-cultural spread of heterosexual bromance if you’re interested. Being an LLM, o3’s response isn’t perfect, but it isn’t bad, either.
If Margot Robbie is mid, what does that mean for every other girl out there, trying her best, who doesn’t have her natural beauty?
Maybe this is why I hate how I look in every picture, but I feel fine in front of a mirror. Another possible explanation is that I suck at smiling for cameras.
I wonder how this sort of bias interacts with Trump’s campaign strategy. The economist Casey Mulligan claims that Trump goes for an “all publicity is good publicity” strategy, where he wants to get his name seen as much as possible. This includes being willing to have the media call him a “liar” to do this, which means his name might start to gain a negative association. On the one hand, Trump won two elections, so it may have worked, but on the other hand, Trump might have won those elections despite this type of negative publicity, so it’s hard to say how well this worked. As far as I can tell, Mulligan has not rigorously and empirically analyzed the results of these strategies.
Also, it’s hard to know how much we should trust the results of a fictitious election study like this, but I am skeptical about it. Perhaps I merely haven’t been exposed to enough similar studies.
Actually, “Why are there no baddies at this scioly meet?” is a direct quote from one of my real, heterosexual male friends, so I don’t know if this can even be called a strawman.
Other, more thorough sources have reported that “there were so many baddies there,” which makes it seem more likely that the perceived lack of baddies was only a result of the mere-exposure effect.
Well, they have tripled according to BMI measurements, which are notoriously dodgy for measuring health. However, I don’t have any reason to believe that the population is getting significantly buffer, so I am going to assume that obesity rates (in terms of body fat) have truly increased.
Honestly, our best bet at answering this question would probably be to have Aella make a poll about this and see if there is any correlation between body type preference and national obesity rates.
There are four studies linked in that text. These effects are more prevalent in people attracted to men than they are to people attracted to women, but they affect both. Additionally, the height of a person’s parents tends to affect the height of their ideal partner, and the effect is socially learned, rather than genetic, as shown by adoption and twin studies.
r=.260, z=20.80, for all of the stats nerds who care.
I hate to invoke evo psych, but it makes sense that humans would evolve not to learn to like bad smells. Poop and spoiled milk are always unsanitary, so it’s not hard to imagine that humans that always stayed away from it were better off than humans who didn’t.
I’m kind of skeptical of the results of this study, given that a lot of people grow to like the smell of cigarette smoke and weed.
I would imagine that the angle the photo is taken at also makes a large difference with the mere-exposure effect. I only ever see myself from the same few angles, so I don’t find it as comforting when I see myself from a different angle.
It’s also good for networking, which is probably more important than whatever little boosts you get from an exposure halo effect.
Well, I suppose it hurts as much as it occupies time and mental space that could be used for more important reminders, but I don’t really care.
Or maybe I have just spent the past 4 hours staring at black and white screens talking about the mere-familiarity effect.
Danggg, 17 footnotes? That’s like one for every 150 words in the main essay, with the average footnote being about 40 words. You really aren’t getting the full experience if you’re not reading these.