The Zeigarnik Effect: The Anguish Of Not Being Able To Finish What Was Started

The Zeigarnik effect reminds us that the brain does not like to leave things by halves or, even more, to be given ambiguous or imprecise information. This explains, for example, why it is annoying to interrupt the reading of a book that interests us. This characteristic would also be behind that anguish experienced when someone leaves us without giving any explanation.

Film and television scriptwriters know this psychological phenomenon very well. Hence, they have been using the well-known Cliffhanger effect for decades  to retain their audience. This technique consists, as you know, in placing the maximum possible tension, effect and emotion right at the end of chapters or cinematographic productions.

This abrupt and unexpected conclusion will force the viewer to be on the lookout for new deliveries. Now, it is clear that we often end up tired of these types of resources because we understand that they are manipulating us. However, on a day-to-day basis, it is almost irremediable not to be subject to this interesting and sophisticated mental mechanism.

Cognitive psychology has always been interested in the Zeigarnik effect and those intrusive thoughts that usually visit us when we are pending tasks or unfinished experiences. Furthermore, this phenomenon could also explain why we often regret more for what we  did not do  than for what we did achieve.

The Zeigarnik effect and an Austrian restaurant

We are in 1920, in a small restaurant in Austria. There, a young Russian psychologist named Bulma Zeigarnik is sitting, somewhat impatient because her teacher, Kurt Lewin, was late. At a certain point, she stopped looking at her watch and, as a good scientific observer, she stopped at what was happening around her.

He realized something curious. The waiters had an amazing memory to remember the orders of each customer. It did not matter how complex the combination of dishes or types of drinks was. They never failed. However, Bulma could see something even more striking: when customers paid the bill, the waiters instantly forgot each person’s orders.

However, in their brains still remained every detail of those others that had not yet gone through the box. That is, unfinished transactions were those pending tasks that the brain could not forget, they were unfinished accounts and therefore impossible to forget.

The young Bulma Zeigarnik did not take long to return to the University and start her famous study, which was finally published in 1927, under the title  “On Finished and Unfinished Tasks” .

The anguish of the unfinished or unrealized

It is often said that what is unfinished or what never came to be, contains by itself a singular beauty. There is in these things a certain melancholy and sadness, that strange anguish for everything that, due to whatever circumstances, could not be completed or even attempted.

There we have pieces like the  S infonia n.8  “Unfinished” by Franz Schubert,  an exquisite piece of music according to the experts and that the author himself was forced to leave half due to an illness. These phenomena, such as, for example, feeling bad for not having dared to start a relationship with a person, are what authors such as Savitsky, Medvec and Gilovich, 1997 describe as “painful omissions”.

This causes, among other things, that we feel discomfort, anger or despair when people do not answer our questions, when they promise us things that later do not come to pass or when affective relationships are ended without us being able to identify the cause of that abandonment very well. .

The brain doesn’t like ambiguity

Schiffman and Greist-Bousquet (1992) conducted a study at the University of Michigan where they demonstrated another characteristic of the Zeigarnik effect. The brain does not like ambiguity. That is to say, the fact of not being able to finish something is so distressing to us as not understanding it or that ambiguous information suddenly appears or that makes us question all of the above.

An example. In the history of television, the Lost phenomenon is always brought up. This series broadcast between 2004 and 2010 was for many people an experience of great psychological impact for different reasons, especially for the end. For a good part of the viewers it was too ambiguous and difficult to understand.

In this case the Zeigarnik effect was twofold. Many questions remained unanswered and those that were offered to many of his followers were not enlightening enough. This has made, perhaps, that the wake and the impact of this series have had more travel in time.

In conclusion. There is one fact worth reflecting on. Whether we like it or not, our everyday reality and the fabric of life itself is threaded by the Zeigarnik effect. There will always be aspects that will remain unanswered, that will be ambiguous and even inexplicable, those that will require a personal inference, as when we get into a David Lynch production.

We must therefore be able to tolerate uncertainty and those voids where logic does not dwell. Life is not a video game, that world where one can pause a fight and restart it later. Sometimes, there are aspects that cannot be taken up again and that will remain pending forever in the universe of our mind. This is something we must consider.

Be that as it may, it is always interesting to delve into these psychological phenomena to understand the metrics and uniqueness of our wonderful brain.