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Mere exposure and proximity: why people date those they see often

6 min read

People tend to like things and people a bit more the more often they see them, and they tend to become friends with whoever is physically close. Psychologists call these the mere exposure effect and the propinquity (proximity) effect. The evidence is real, but most of it is about friendship, photos or neutral objects, not about dating, and too much exposure can flatten or reverse the effect.

For anyone choosing where to meet people, the useful version is modest: repeated, relaxed contact in the same place gives liking a chance to build. It doesn't guarantee attraction to any one person.

Mere exposure: what Zajonc found

The starting point is Robert Zajonc's 1968 monograph "Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In his experiments, as described in summaries, English-speaking participants saw unfamiliar nonsense words, ideograph-like symbols and photographs of men's faces, each shown 0, 1, 2, 5, 10 or 25 times. Liking rose with frequency along a curve that flattened as showings piled up.

Two limits are worth knowing. The stimuli were meaningless symbols and photos, not people in a room. And the experiments stopped at 25 exposures, so they couldn't show what happens with much heavier repetition.

Later work covered that. A 1989 meta-analysis by Robert Bornstein, covering 208 experiments, reported an average effect of r = 0.26, strongest with brief exposure to unfamiliar things and typically peaking within 10 to 20 showings, per a Wikipedia summary of it. That summary notes the meta-analysis inherits the limits of the studies it pooled. A 2017 meta-analysis by Montoya and colleagues pooled 268 curves from 81 articles and found an inverted-U shape: liking rises, then levels off and can decline. That pattern appeared for visual stimuli but not for sounds, and the authors concluded that existing explanations don't fully account for the data.

Does it work on real people?

A well-known classroom study is Moreland and Beach (1992). As summarized by Simply Psychology, four similar-looking women attended a university lecture course across a semester, attending 0, 5, 10 or 15 sessions without speaking to anyone. At the end, students rated each woman from photographs. The more sessions she'd attended, the more attractive, familiar and similar to themselves she was rated. Only a secondary summary was read. It doesn't list limits, but the design used four women, photo ratings and one course.

So it's reasonable evidence that simply being around, in a neutral setting, raises how people rate you. It isn't evidence that anyone fell in love in a lecture hall.

Proximity: who's close by

The classic proximity research is the Westgate housing studies by Festinger, Schachter and Back (1950). One widely cited finding, as relayed on Wikipedia, is that residents near a stairway tended to have more friends on other floors than those farther from it. That summary gives no sample details, so treat it as the origin of the idea, not as an effect size.

A cleaner test is a 2008 study by Back, Schmukle and Egloff at the University of Leipzig. As reported by ScienceDaily, 54 first-year students were assigned random seat numbers at an introductory session. A year later, students who had sat next to each other rated their friendship as more intense, and so did students who had only sat in the same row. The seating was random, so it wasn't who they'd have chosen. The sample is small, from one university, and the outcome was friendship, not romance.

Where familiarity doesn't help

Exposure only helps when the contact is neutral or pleasant. Wikipedia's propinquity entry, crediting Norton, Frost and Ariely (2007), says repeated negative experiences make the effect far less likely, and its mere-exposure entry notes that in intergroup contact studies, more exposure can raise hostility when attitudes are already negative.

A separate line of research asked whether learning more about someone raises liking. Norton, Frost and Ariely (2007) reported that more information about a person led, on average, to less liking, because people uncovered ways they differed. A 2025 Registered Report by Horsham and colleagues tried to replicate it with 801 participants recruited online through Prolific. Support was mixed. The finding that people expect to like someone they know more about replicated, but the central "more information means less liking" result did not. The authors suggest learning more may help overcome early negative impressions, but does little once a positive one exists.

So "familiarity breeds contempt" and "familiarity breeds liking" are both overstated, and the evidence is mixed. What seems most consistent is that early repetition raises comfort, and the rest depends on who the person is.

What this says about where couples meet

A different kind of evidence is how couples report meeting. Rosenfeld, Thomas and Hausen (2019, PNAS) used two US surveys of heterosexual couples (about 2,500 in 2009 and about 3,000 in 2017). Their smoothed estimates for meeting through places where people repeatedly cross paths dropped between 1995 and 2017: coworkers from 19% to 11%, neighbors from 8% to 3%, primary or secondary school from 10% to 5%. Meeting online rose from 2% to 39%.

The authors say the rise in meeting at a bar or restaurant (19% to 27% over the same period) since about 2010 is due entirely to couples who met online and then met in person at one. The study covers only heterosexual couples, asked retrospectively, and had cumulative response rates of 13% (2009) and 11% (2017). It shows where people met, not why they were drawn to one another.

What it means for choosing places

This is interpretation, not a finding. A few ideas follow from the research:

If you log nights out in Run Game, a session's name and notes can include where you went, so after a few weeks you can see which places gave you repeat conversations.

What to do next

  1. Pick one recurring thing that happens at the same time each week, such as a class, a club, a gym session or a weekly event.
  2. Commit to six weeks. Familiarity needs repetition, and one visit doesn't give it any.
  3. Learn three names in the first three weeks, and use them.
  4. Arrive early or stay ten minutes after, when conversation happens most easily.
  5. Say something specific to the same person every second or third week. "How did the training go?" builds on last time.
  6. If someone seems interested, suggest something outside the setting. If a no comes, thank them and stay friendly.
  7. After six weeks, check your notes. If nothing has turned into conversation, try a different place.

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