Familiarity: Liking or contempt?

PsyBlog covers a good exchange between two research teams about whether familiarity with others induces us to like them more or to dislike them. The literature generally supports the liking side of the debate, and when teaching it, that’s what professors generally emphasize. But this exchange points out how science works: we challenge the status quo and sometimes find surprising results (and suffer the slings and arrows of the establishment). If the results can be replicated and extended, then we learn a whole lot more about behavior.