Spend More Time Around the People You Want to Befriend. This is something called the “mere-exposure” effect. People tend to like other people who are familiar to them. So if you want to hang with the cool kids, get that promotion, or ask out your crush, you need to be visible and let them get to know you. Even, in some cases, you don’t even need to interact with them to get noticed. In a study conducted by the University of Pittsburgh, they had 4 women pretend to be university students in a psychology class. Each woman showed up a handful of times to class, and when photos were shown to male students in the class, they showed a greater sense of like for the women they’d seen most often in class, even though they’d never met them.