🧬 Familiarity Bias:
Choosing things we know over new things.
People have a tendency to prefer (i.e., choose) products, services and options that feel familiar to them. They may even actively avoid considering new options.
This is also occasionally called the Mere Exposure Effect.
To utilise this bias, it's helpful to understand why it works.
In short, it helps humans to make quick judgements:
1. It reduces uncertainty
2. It's quicker to interpret
Imagine that you're walking through the serengeti, and you turn to see this:
Your life depends on your ability to process this, and make a snap judgement about what you should do next.
You don't want to waste valuable seconds deciding if it's a lion, a rarer breed of cat or a man in a lion suit. You have a bias towards what you're familiar with (a lion), and so you run.
This bias was necessary for our survival, and our brains have been trained to gravitate towards the familiar.
✅ Productivity & efficiency
It's easier, and more efficient, to use something that you're already familiar with, obviously.
The key is that it can also be more efficient to use a product that's similar to something you already know.
✅ Sharing & referrals
When sharing a product, people will intuitively try and compare it to something that the other person knows. e.g., "it's like Airbnb, but for boats".
✅ Complexity & understanding
If you want to make it easier for people to understand how to use your product, you can make it similar to something that already know how to use.