A closer look
People tend to develop a strong preference for things or individuals merely because they are familiar with them. That terribly annoying coworker you absolutely despised on your first day of work eventually becomes your favorite office buddy simply because your brain got tired of resisting their constant physical presence. We are biologically conditioned to equate familiarity with safety, meaning we will eventually fall in love with terrible pop songs on the radio if the station forces us to listen to them eighty times a week. This profoundly lazy neurological shortcut explains why you keep going back to the exact same mediocre restaurant and ordering the exact same boring meal instead of risking a new culinary experience. Our preferences are rarely based on actual quality or merit, but rather on whatever random stimuli happens to hover around us long enough to completely wear down our psychological defenses!
