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Background: I noticed with a lot of things, but especially music I tend to hate certain songs and albums initially but they always seem to grow on me, and vice versa. I noticed this pattern in a lot of my friends as well so my question is:
Why do humans dislike things they normally like later on?
It could be the case that it takes time to like some thinks. We get habituated by being exposed to the same stimuli, here music. The dislike decreases after repeated presentations and the likeness may occur, if at all. At the same time, there is a continuous 'strive' between 'familiarity' and 'change'. The experience of 'change' we face by listening to some songs at the beginning, might become the experience of 'familiar' sounds and the liking could develop. The same experience I've had with some food preparations.
One relevant piece of research is the research on the “mere exposure” effect. Basically, the idea is that being exposed to something novel is enough to make you like it a little bit more. The most common interpretation is that we generally like the things we can understand/process easily and that repeated exposures makes the stimulus more familiar and thus easier to process. This goes under the name “processing fluency”.
