What is the Zeigarnik effect?

-What we are doing today, matters tomorrow-

Few months from my graduation, I attended a 3 days’ course, specifically catered for final year postgraduates from different disciplines to interact on various practical group exercises, anything from creating imagery start-ups to political debates and more.

What I distinctly remember from the course, was an unrelated black & white painting of a woman in all the PowerPoint presentations presented by trainers, usually, they quickly flipped through the image without any further explanation.

In the first presentation, we thought it was an amateurish mistake, but soon enough we realised that it was actually a pattern, and our curious minds recorded the painting and move on to the next slide.

On the last day of the course, one of the senior trainers gave us a short explanation on the subliminal effect the presence of the mysterious painting had on our subconscious minds.

The “trick” was explained to be a cognatic bias phenomenon called The Zeigarnik effect. Simply our minds retain its focus on incomplete, interrupted, and unexplained events/tasks, and will let go once the event/task has been completed or explained. A good example is how our memory retains all the information before an examination and soon after we tend to forget all the details.

This phenomenon was coined after a Russian psychologist Bluma Wulfovna Zeigarnik . She was one of the students of the influential gestalt theorist Professor Kurt Lewin, the founder of social psychology.

The idea was hatched after eating at a restaurant in Vienna in 1927. After finishing her dinner, the bill was paid and she left the restaurant. Then she suddenly realized that she has forgotten her purse there, and rushed back to approach the same waiter who picked up the order. Much to her surprise, the waiter did not recognize her at all. To her curiosity, the waiter recollected the unpaid orders more efficiently than the one that was already settled, and that was the reason the waiter had forgotten her.

This observation ignited a series of experimental studies, participants were given a limited time to complete simple tasks, anything from assembling puzzles and placing beads on a string to solving mathematical problems. Then halfway through, the tasks were abruptly interrupted by introducing new and unrelated tasks. After an hour, the participants were asked to explain what they remembered from the interrupted tasks. The results from the initial studies showed that a significant number of participants being able to remember more the uncompleted tasks rather than the finished ones.

Further studies have shown that the Zeigarnik effect has a better effect on enthusiastic and motivated individuals rather than the passive ones, and If it was applied correctly it could even enhance the learning and memorizing process.

In a layman's term, the Zeigarnik effect is our subconscious policing mechanism, so if we are able to avoid procrastination and dig deeper to forge a path to solve the task, then our mind will archive the task for good. On the contrary, if we fail to make up a plan and keep on postponing, this could actually have a harmful effect on our will power.

Without knowing it, we are being exposed to the Zeigarnik effect externally on a daily basis in the advertisement and entertainment industry. And it is to some extent mentally addictive, the industry is using the “cliffhanger trick”, e.g. by introducing a dramatic scene either before the commercial break or at the ending of a TV series episode. Then we are hooked and craving to see through the commercial, in order to make sure we are not missing any second of the next scene after the commercials or the in the next episode.

Like everything in life it can have a negative impact, when we fail to complete interrupted tasks, our mind can suffer a blow and even causing anxiety, and to a certain extent affect our self-esteem. On another hand, if we are able to step on the plate to complete the mission, we will bounce back to recover our self-confidence.

In the age of procrastination/social media/multitasking/information overload, we are constantly being bombarded by half-chewed and undigested information, anything from our Twitter feeds to FB/LinkedIn endless scroll. Every beep on our device steals our attention from the actual task, although if we are intentionally using the Zeigarnik effect, we might benefit from it but unfortunately, we usually don’t and end up being over exhausted.

Maybe it is an oversimplification and I am not by far an expert in this subject, but my opinion is that the Zeigarnik effect might be one of the reasons people are loaded with anxiety, jealousy, lack of motivation, and unhappiness. We have too many unfinished tasks/missions and lack a plan to achieve them, and then we are adding more to the list without knowing that our subconscious is feeling the burden with the extensive list we have already accumulated from previous years' new year resolutions.

So now the questing is how to do we find, apply, and even intentionally avoid the Zeigarnik effect in our lives. Here you have a list of suggestions, you might find useful:

1- Mapping the tasks that we never completed: the larger task we fail to complete burdens our mind most, the minor one less, and sometimes they are not a task made by us but by our biology, traditions, etc.

Prioritizing the most emotionally loaded "uncompleted" tasks, the one we had investment longest time for (e.g. education).

2- Mapping incidents that have harmed us: e.g. emotional separations (breakups, death of loved ones, etc.) torment our soul, our minds will not rest until we have a discloser on why/what/how things went wrong. Our conscious minds keep on reliving it until our memories have faded.

Love and lost are a part of life, the earlier we accept it, the better. That is a piece of simple advice, but while we are going through the emotional hurricane no one can help us but the TIME that fades our memories.

3- List procrastination/noise habits: it is a subjective matter, while there are some time-wasters we are sharing like infinite FB scrolling and checking our emails 100 times per day, reacting to all the notification sounds coming out from our devices, etc. “Normal” people with laser focus aim succeed more than the talents who are procrastinating.

4- Multitasking is for robots, not humans: modern society praises the multitaskers, but studies have shown that only 2.5% are wired to be one, while the rest are trying and get burnout. Although, even without knowing it we all are multitasking, answering emails while driving, watching Youtube while eating, etc. Having said that, sometimes we have to multitask but that doesn’t mean it should become our mode of operation.

5- Don’t be too ambitious while being lazy: make sure your eyes are not bigger than your stomach. Take up the task you know for sure you can complete. If we are striving for something great in life, then we should improve our time management and planning skills. Start on a small scale, something that is measurable and can be quantified by numbers rather than ambiguous words. As Salvador Dali said, “Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings”.

6- Don’t chase other people's dreams: sometimes we chose other people's paths in life, and blindly replicating their actions. Surely we all should have a role model in life, but we shouldn’t choose one before knowing our passion/obsession in life.

7- Be selective on what to remember and to forget: again easy said than done. But if we are able to be selective on the tasks we are taking up, then we are able to control what kind of information our subconscious police will remind us on. Meaning our task performance controls the flow of recurring thoughts, not the other way around. 

<div class="LI-profile-badge" data-version="v1" data-size="medium" data-locale="en_US" data-type="vertical" data-theme="light" data-vanity="ali-jahanshahi"><a class="LI-simple-link" >Ali Jahanshahi</a></div>