Effects of varying exposure to another person with familiar or unfamiliar thought processes

From work on the positive effects of mere exposure it was hypothesized that persons who gave familiar associations to a set of common stimulus words would be better liked than persons who gave unfamiliar associations, and that longer exposure would enhance the evaluation of associations and target persons who were initially strange. Evidence in support of these hypotheses was gathered in a study in which 6 male and 36 female undergraduates viewed word associations by target persons who varied in whether their background was familiar or strange, whether their associations were high, moderate, or low in familiarity, and whether their thoughts were given a high, moderate, or low degree of exposure. The preference or familiar others is suggested as one factor in the more widely studied preference for similar others, and a method is outlined for disentangling the two.