Mere-exposure effect One of Zajonc's contributions to psychology is the demonstration of the mere-exposure effect. The exposure effect demonstrates a phenomenon by which people show a preference towards an object simply because they are familiar with it. He focused on processes involved in social behavior, with an emphasis on the relationship between affect, or emotion, and cognition.
Social facilitation Another contribution that Zajonc made to psychology was through demonstrating social facilitation. Social facilitation is the improvement of performance around the presence of others. Zajonc was able to provide support for social facilitation through a variety of experiments. In one experiment he sought to see if individuals would change their decisions depending on the presence of an audience. He found that in the presence of an audience, the dominant preference would be enhanced. In another experiment on social facilitation, Robert Zajonc gave participants associations to 184 words alone and in the presence of an audience. Half of the participants worked alone, then with an audience, and vice versa. Zajonc found that participants were affected by the presence of an audience, and fewer unique responses were given when with an audience. The audience acts as a general drive energizer, in the presence of an audience there would be an increased probability of the dominant response.
Preferences need no inferences In 1980, a speculative and widely debated paper entitled "Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences," invited in honor of his receipt of the 1979 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the
American Psychological Association, made the argument that affective and cognitive systems are largely independent, and that affect is more powerful and comes first. This paper stimulated a great deal of interest in affect in psychology, and was one of a number of influences that brought the study of emotion and affective processes back into the forefront of American and European psychology. The nature of affective judgments can be perceived as independent of, and precede in time of, the perceptual and cognitive operations often thought of as constituting the basis of these affecting judgments. His proposals were presented to be contrary to the widely considered belief in most contemporary psychology theories that affective judgment is post-cognitive.
(a) Diet, husbands and wives eat the same type of food, hence the fat consumed is similar and this might lead to similar facial features.
(b) Regional similarities, married couples usually live in the same region, hence experience similar weather conditions which might lead to facial similarities.
(c) People marry individuals who look like them or will eventually look like them.
(d) The theory of emotional efference (Waynbaum, 1907), one of the implications of this theory is that the similarity in facial features could be attributed to the feeling of empathy. When you are being empathetic towards someone you unknowingly mimic their expression which then leads you to feel similar emotions. So the involvement of facial motor muscles in empathy might result in similar facial features among people who have lived together for a long period of time. These findings, according to Zajonc, tell us that social contact with others might have an effect on our facial features.
Confluence model Zajonc, along with Greg Markus, developed the Confluence Model (1975), which provided a
mathematical model of the effect of
birth order and
family size on
IQ scores quantifying the relationship between in-family dynamics variability and intellectual ability. In forming this quantitative value, the confluence forms an averages of the absolute intellectual capacities of the entire family environment. As families increase in size, the overall IQ of the family drops; children from larger families do have slightly lower IQs. The last child in the family is denied the opportunity to tutor younger children, and there is a slight "extra" detriment for being the youngest child in a family. These effects are theoretically important, but the size of the effects is fairly small (amounting to a range of about 3 IQ points), thus, birth order is not an absolute determining factor for IQ although its influence is apparent. The capacity to which IQ is birth-order dependent was challenged by Wichman, Rodgers, and MacCallum (2006) whom claim that the observed differences were a product of between-family differences instead. Zajonc argued that this perceived conclusion as based on them incorrectly treating birth-order effects to parallel a
linear relationship, in addition to shortcomings in the methods they progressed such as implementing the use of unfocused tests causing significantly significant trends to remain unrecognized. A study by Bjerkedal et al. (in press) offers support to the with-in family nature of the phenomena through its own findings showing that increasing birth rank paralleled a decline in IQ in a sample of 127,902 Norwegian same-family siblings.
Sensory interaction on non-human animals Zajonc wanted to test the sensory interaction hypothesis, that a stimulus response not only depends on the intensity but also depends on other aspects of the condition. For this, Zajonc conducted an experiment where he studied two male white carneaux pigeons. The pigeons were trained to distinguish between two tones. They were required to peck the left key for loud noise and the right key for soft noise. Every correct response was awarded with food to the pigeons. After each trial, there was a blackout followed by a light which indicated start of another trial. Zajonc found that the sensory interaction hypothesis does hold true, the pigeons not only used the intensity of the tone but also used the presentation of light while making a response. == Awards ==