Zeigarnik effect: the brain does not support being left half
Television and movies are full of unfinished stories that leave us feeling suspenseful. Chapters that end the cliffhangers to encourage us to keep abreast of what will happen, stories parallels that unfold in fits and starts, second, third and fourth parts of a movie, etc.
Something similar happens with projects that we leave unfinished. In general, the feeling of not having seen something finished that was started leaves us with an unpleasant feeling. Why? To understand this we can resort to a phenomenon called Zeigarnik effect.
What is the Zeigarnik effect?
At the beginning of the 20th century, a Soviet researcher named Bluma zeigarnik she was working with the psychologist Kurt lewin when she drew his attention to something very curious that she had observed: the waiters seemed to remember better the orders of the tables that had not yet been served or paid than those that had already been effected.
That is, the memory of waiters seemed to give a higher priority to evoking information about unfinished orders, regardless of whether they had been started earlier or later than those that had already been delivered and paid.
Memories of completed orders were more easily lost.Bluma Zeigarnik set out to verify experimentally whether memories of unfinished processes are better stored in memory than those of other projects. The result of this line of research undertaken in the 1920s is what is now known as Zeigarnik effect.
Experimenting with memory
The study that made the Zeigarnik effect famous was conducted in 1927. In this experiment, a series of volunteers had to successively perform a series of 20 exercises, such as math 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, she focused on the effect that interrupting these tasks had on the participants' brains.
To do this, she made the participants stop solving the tests at a certain point. Later, she found that these people remembered better data about the tests that had been left halfregardless of the type of exercise they required to be resolved.
The Zeigarnik effect was reinforced by the results of this experiment. Thus, the Zeigarnik effect was considered to be a tendency to better remember information related to unfinished tasks. In addition, Bluma Zeigarnik's studies were framed in the field theory of Kurt Lewin and had an influence on the Gestalt theory.
Why is the Zeigarnik effect relevant?
When the cognitive psychology At the end of the 1950s, the interest of this new generation of researchers turned again towards the study of memory, and they took into account the Zeigarnik effect. 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 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.: they began to create advertising pieces based on a story that is presented in pieces, as in installments, to make potential clients memorize a brand well and transform the interest they feel in knowing how the story is resolved by interest in the product that is offers.
The Zeigarnik effect and works of fiction
Ads are very short and therefore have little room for maneuver to create deep stories and that generate interest, but this does not happen with the works of fiction that we find in books or in screens. The Zeigarnik effect has also served as a starting point to achieve something that many fiction producers want: build audience loyalty and build a group of fervent followers of the story being told.
It is basically about facilitating that there are people willing to devote a significant portion of their attention and their memory to everything related to what is being told. The Zeigarnik effect is a good handle to achieve this, since it indicates that the information about the stories that have not yet been discovered in their entirety will remain very much alive in the memory of the public, making them think about it easily in any context and generating beneficial collateral effects: discussion forums in which there is speculation about what will happen, theories made by the fans, etc.
Lack of evidence to demonstrate the Zeigarnik effect
Despite the relevance that the Zeigarnik effect has had beyond academic settings, the truth is that it is not sufficiently proven that it exists as part of the normal functioning of memory. This is so, in the first place, because the methodology used in psychological research during the 1920s did not meet the guarantees that would be expected from this field. nowadays, and secondly because attempts to repeat Bluma Zeigarnik's (or similar) experiment have yielded disparate results that do not point in one direction clear.
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 that we memorize or try to remember has a value assigned depending on the interest that the information that we try to incorporate into our memory has for us. If something interests us more, we will think more times about it, 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 does not allow to shelve the matter, but, in the end, the simplest explanations are also the most boring.