Novelty penalty - people prefer to hear about familiar ideas and experiences

Sep 21, 2024 5:14 PM
Sep 23, 2024 12:17 PM

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We must look at one final psychological phenomenon, known as the “novelty penalty.” The term comes from an experiment by Gus Cooney, one of the researchers who discovered the liking gap—the disparity between how much someone thinks another person likes them, versus how much they actually do. His team first placed participants into groups of three. While alone, each member watched one of two short videos: a TED talk about the intelligence of crows or an interview with the owner of a specialist soda shop.

The trio then met as a group, and one member—the speaker—was asked to describe the video he or she had seen, while the other two members listened for two minutes. In some groups, the listeners and speakers had all watched the same video, while in others, the speaker spoke about the clip that the listeners hadn’t seen.

You would expect that learning something new would be far more enjoyable and interesting than hearing something that is already known to you. But the listeners had the opposite reaction: They tended to prefer hearing about the video they had just seen, remaining underwhelmed by the talk that contained fresh information. This is the novelty penalty: a general preference to hear about familiar experiences.

You will have almost certainly noticed the novelty penalty when you have returned from an exotic holiday. Your mind is still full of all the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of the places and the amazing people that you met along the way. As you try to describe the experience, however, you may find people’s eyes glazing over. It’s not that your audience doesn’t care. They simply don’t have enough knowledge to immerse themselves in your descriptions and understand why the trip was so special to you. The informational gaps could create a feeling of distance that undermines the sense of a shared reality.

One strategy to avoid this would be to focus on topics that are equally familiar to both parties. You may think that it’s cool to talk about music that no one else listens to, or films no one else has seen—but this can have the very opposite effect. Looking for shared interests or common experiences to discuss is much healthier.

But avoiding all unfamiliar topics is far from the ideal way of building social connection; if a subject is central to your life and represents an important element of your personality, you need to find a way to express it—otherwise your shared reality with the other person will always have an important part missing. In these cases, you can escape the novelty penalty with vivid storytelling that helps to put the other person in your shoes. If you know that the person is a gastronome, for example, start out by discussing the food you ate on the trip, which should act as a bridge to their own interests and experiences.

As you move onto less familiar terrain, you must make sure that you provide enough details to avoid creating unnecessary informational gaps. Think carefully about their baseline knowledge, so that you don’t patronize them—if necessary, you should ask how familiar the subject already is—and use this to gauge the elements that you need to include to ease their understanding.