Zeigarnik Effect: The Brain Can’t Stand Being Left Halfway
Television and cinema are full of unfinished stories that leave us with a feeling of suspense. Chapters that end with cliffhangers to encourage us to stay aware of what will happen, parallel stories that develop in fits and starts, second, third and fourth parts of a film, etc.
Something similar happens with the projects that we leave unfinished. In general, The feeling of not having seen something finished that was started leaves us with an unpleasant feeling Because? To understand this we can turn to a phenomenon called Zeigarnik effect
At the beginning of the 20th century, a Soviet researcher named Bluma Zeigarnik He was working with psychologist Kurt Lewin when he drew his attention to something very curious he had observed: waiters seemed to remember better the orders for tables that had not yet been served or paid for than those for those that had already been placed.
That is, the waiters’ memory seemed to give greater priority to evoking information about unfinished orders, regardless of whether they had been started before or after those that had already been delivered and paid for. Memories of completed orders were more easily lost
Bluma Zeigarnik set out to experimentally verify whether memories about unfinished processes are stored better in memory than those of other projects. The result of this line of research undertaken in the 1920s is what is known today as Zeigarnik effect.
Experimenting with memory
The study that made the Zeigarnik effect famous was carried out in 1927. In this experiment, a series of volunteers had to successively perform a series of 20 exercises, such as mathematics problems, and some manual tasks. But Bluma Zeigarnik was not interested in the performance of the participants or how successful they were in undertaking these small tests. Simply, focused on the effect that interrupting these tasks had on the participants’ brains
To do this, he made the participants stop solving the tests at a certain point. After, found that these people remembered information better about the tests that had been left half-finished regardless of the type of exercise they required to be solved.
The Zeigarnik effect was reinforced by the results of this experiment. Thus, the Zeigarnik effect came to be considered as a tendency to better remember information related to unfinished tasks. Furthermore, Bluma Zeigarnik’s studies were framed in Kurt Lewin’s field theory and had an influence on Gestalt theory.
Why is the Zeigarnik effect relevant?
When cognitive psychology emerged in the late 1950s, the interest of this new generation of researchers was once again directed towards the study of memory, and they took the Zeigarnik effect 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, to ensure that the mental processes involved in memory store the 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: Advertising pieces began to be created based on a story that is presented in pieces, as in fascicles, to make potential customers memorize a brand well and transform the interest they feel in knowing how the story is resolved into interest in the product they is offered.
Advertisements are very short and therefore have little room for maneuver to create deep stories that generate interest, but this does not happen with the 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: build audience loyalty and create a group of fervent followers of the story being told
It is basically about facilitating the existence of people willing to dedicate a significant portion of their attention and memory to everything related to what is being told. The Zeigarnik effect is a good way 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 in any context. and generating beneficial side effects: discussion forums in which there is speculation about what will happen, theories made by fans, etc.
There is a lack of evidence to demonstrate the Zeigarnik effect
Despite the relevance that the Zeigarnik effect has had beyond academic environments, The truth is that it is not sufficiently proven that it exists as part of the normal functioning of memory This is so, firstly, because the methodology used in psychological research during the 1920s did not meet the guarantees that would be expected from this field today, and secondly because of the attempts to repeat Bluma Zeigarnik’s experiment ( or similar) have yielded disparate 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 human motivation and its way of interacting with memory In fact, everything we memorize or try to remember has a value attributed to it depending on the interest that the information we are trying to incorporate into our memory has for 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 “revisiting” 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 does not allow us to shelve the matter, but, in the end, the simplest explanations are also the most boring.
