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Cited by 224

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 5 of the 5 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Less is more: The lure of ambiguity, or why familiarity breeds contempt.

Norton, Michael I., Frost, Jeana H., Ariely, Dan·2007·Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Abstract

The present research shows that although people believe that learning more about others leads to greater liking, more information about others leads, on average, to less liking. Thus, ambiguity--lacking information about another--leads to liking, whereas familiarity--acquiring more information--can breed contempt. This "less is more" effect is due to the cascading nature of dissimilarity: Once evidence of dissimilarity is encountered, subsequent information is more likely to be interpreted as further evidence of dissimilarity, leading to decreased liking. The authors document the negative relationship between knowledge and liking in laboratory studies and with pre- and postdate data from online daters, while showing the mediating role of dissimilarity.

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Metadata

Authors
Norton, M. I., Frost, J. H., & Ariely, D.
Venue
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Published
2007
Volume
92
Issue
1
Pages
97-105
ISSN
  • 0022-3514 (ISSN-L)
  • 1939-1315
OpenAlex
W2156555424
Cited by
224
References
5
FWCI
13.93
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Less is more: The lure of ambiguity, or why familiarity breeds contempt. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1037/0022-3514.92.1.97
The paper
Norton, M. I., Frost, J. H., & Ariely, D. (2007). Less is more: The lure of ambiguity, or why familiarity breeds contempt. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.1.97

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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.