Zeigarnik effect: the brain can’t stand to be left half-finished

Why do we hate to be left half-finished? A curious psychological effect explains it.

Television and movies are full of unfinished stories that leave us feeling suspenseful. Chapters that end with cliffhangers to encourage us to keep watching to find out what will happen, parallel stories that develop in fits and starts, second, third and fourth parts of a movie, etc.

Something similar happens with the projects we leave unfinished. In general, the feeling of not having seen the completion of something that was started leaves us with an unpleasant sensation.Why is that? To understand this, we can turn to a phenomenon called the Zeigarnik effect.

What is the Zeigarnik effect?

At the beginning of the 20th century, a Soviet researcher named Bluma Zeigarnik was working with psychologist Kurt Lewin when Lewin called his attention to something very curious he had observed: waiters seemed to remember orders from tables that had not yet been served or paid for better than those that had already been placed.

That is, the waiters' memory seemed to give higher priority to recalling information about unfinished orders, regardless of whether they had been initiated earlier or later than those that had already been delivered and paid for. Memories about completed orders were more easily lost..

Bluma Zeigarnik set out to find out experimentally whether memories about unfinished processes are stored better in memory than those about other projects. The result of this line of research, which began in the 1920s, is what is known today as the Zeigarnik effect.

Experimenting with memory

The study that made the Zeigarnik effect famous was conducted in 1927. In this experiment, a series of volunteers were asked to perform a series of 20 successive exercises, such as math problems, and some manual tasks. But Bluma Zeigarnik was not interested in how well the participants performed or how successful they were in undertaking these small tests. He simply he focused on the effect that interrupting these tasks had on the participants' brains..

To do this, he had the participants stop solving the tests at a certain point. Afterwards, he found that these people remembered better, He then found that these people remembered better data about the half-finished tests, regardless of the type of exercise required.The Zeigarnik effect was reinforced, regardless of the type of exercise required to solve them.

The Zeigarnik effect was reinforced by the results of this experiment. Thus, the Zeigarnik effect came to be regarded as a tendency to better remember information related to unfinished tasks. Furthermore, Bluma Zeigarnik's studies were framed within Kurt Lewin's field theory and influenced Gestalt theory.

Why is the Zeigarnik effect relevant?

When cognitive psychology emerged in the late 1950s, the interest of this new generation of researchers turned again to the study of memory, and they took the Zeigarnik effect very much into account. The conclusions drawn by Bluma Zeigarnik from this experiment were extended to any learning process. For example, it was hypothesized that an effective study method should include some pauses, in order to make the mental processes involved in memory store information well.

But the Zeigarnik effect was not only used in education, but in all those processes in which someone has to "learn" something, in the broadest sense of the word. For example, in the world of advertising, it served to inspire certain techniques based on the suspense associated with a brand or product.The Zeigarnik effect: advertising pieces began to be created based on a story that is presented in pieces, as in installments, to make potential customers memorize a brand well and transform their interest in knowing how the story is resolved into interest in the product being offered.

The Zeigarnik effect and works of fiction

Advertisements are very short and therefore have little leeway to create deep stories that generate interest, but this is not the case with works of fiction that we find in books or on screens. The Zeigarnik effect has also served as a starting point to achieve something that many fiction producers want: to build audience loyalty and create a group of fervent followers of the story that is being told..

Basically, it is a matter of facilitating the existence of people willing to devote a significant portion of their attention and memory to everything related to what is being told. The Zeigarnik effect is a good handle to achieve this, since it indicates that information about stories that have not yet been fully discovered will remain very vivid in the public's memory, making it easy to think about it in any context and generating beneficial collateral effects: discussion forums in which people speculate about what will happen, theories made by fans, etc.

There is a lack of evidence to prove the Zeigarnik effect.

Despite the relevance that the Zeigarnik effect has had beyond academic environments, the truth is that it has not been sufficiently proven to exist as part of the normal functioning of memory, The truth is that it has not been sufficiently proven to exist as part of normal memory functioning.. This is so, firstly, because the methodology used in psychological research during the 1920s did not meet the safeguards that would be expected in this field today, and secondly because attempts to replicate Bluma Zeigarnik's experiment (or similar ones) have yielded mixed results that do not point in a clear direction.

However, it is possible that the Zeigarnik effect exists beyond the mechanics of memory storage and has more to do with motivation. and has more to do with human motivation and the way it interacts with memory.. In fact, everything we memorize or try to remember has a value attributed to it depending on how interesting the information we are trying to incorporate into our memory is to us. If something interests us more, we will think about it more times, and that in turn is a way of reinforcing memories by mentally "reviewing" what we have memorized before.

In short, to consider whether the Zeigarnik effect exists or not, it is necessary to take into account many more factors than memory itself. It is a conclusion that either allows us to put the matter to rest, but, at the end of the day, the simplest explanations are also the most boring.