The Mere Exposure Effect
Zajonc's research revealed something counterintuitive: we don't like things because we know them. We like them because we've seen them. Remote workers lose influence not from worse work, but from less visibility.
In 1968, Robert Zajonc showed people Chinese characters they'd never seen before. Some characters appeared once. Others appeared twenty times. When asked which characters they "preferred," people consistently chose the ones they'd seen more often. No meaning. No interaction. Just exposure.
The mechanism is perceptual fluency. Your brain processes familiar stimuli faster and interprets that processing ease as preference. You don't decide to like something. Your brain confuses "easy to process" with "good."
This has real consequences at work. Remote employees who produce excellent work but remain invisible lose influence. Not because their output is worse, but because their colleagues' brains haven't processed them enough to generate preference. Proximity isn't about collaboration. It's about repeated exposure.
The nudge: Engineer low-effort visibility. Async video updates. Brief check-ins. Shared channels where people see each other's names daily. Aim for your team to "encounter" each other at least once per workday, even passively. Familiarity does the rest.
