Familiarity Heuristic - Important Research

Important Research

Recent studies have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to demonstrate that people use different areas of the brain when reasoning about familiar and unfamiliar situations. This holds true over different kinds of reasoning problems. Familiar situations are processed in a system involving the frontal and temporal lobes whereas unfamiliar situations are processed in the frontal and parietal lobes. These two similar but dissociated processes provide a biological explanation for the differences between heuristic reasoning and formal logic.

Monin (2004) showed that familiarity of human faces is based on attractiveness. In this study Monin showed his subjects pictures of faces. The subjects were asked to rate how familiar the face was or was not using visual cues. The visual cues were choosing a picture of a butterfly (attractive) when the subject thought the face was familiar, and choosing a picture of a rat (unattractive) when the subject did not find the face familiar. The result of this study was that the subjects were more familiar when the face was attractive regardless of prior exposure to the picture (or person) itself. This has been referred to as the warm glow effect. The warm glow effect states that positive stimuli seem more familiar because of the positive emotions they evoke in us.