The Zeigarnick Effect

Forget me, forget me not

Today we’re going to muse on a psychological phenomenon. As a computer programmer I am always stunned by both the similarities and the disimilarities between the human mind and a computer program. On the one hand, it’s a one-to-one facsimile, on the other hand they live on different planets. The wisdom is knowing when the mind is behaving as a computer and when it’s not, and it is in this spirit that I wanted to dig in to a psychological concept and explore what I think are some of the long-reaching connections.
Imagine you’re the Lithuanian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, seated in a crowded restaurant in 1927. You notice something interesting about the waiter: no matter how many customers are waiting for their meals, he manages to remember the correct orders of all the customers who have not been served. Being a psychologist, and curious, you begin to speculate on whether this man has an eidetic memory. So you go to him and you ask him, that couple eating over there, what did they order? That is when you discover that while he was able to memorize all the partially executed orders, he could not remember anything about the completed orders. What was happening?
This interesting interaction almost a century ago, was the discovery of the Zeigarnik Effect. Bluma Zeigarnik framed it as the concept that our mind tends to remember incomplete tasks or interrupted actions more easily , rather than tasks that have already been completed. At the time in which Zeigarnik was working, when very little was known about the structure of human memory, this is about as far as she could push the concept. However, given what we know now, I think that there are longer-reaching implications than just incomplete tasks remaining in the mind.
After the discovery of the Zeigarnik effect, it was seen more or less as an interesting psychological toy. By creating situations of incompleteness or suspense, brands quickly determined that this was a way to keep their users hooked and motivate them to take action. The first place that this was used was in advertising jingles. In fact, the 1930’s was the golden era of advertising jingles, due to the fact that direct advertising during prime-time hours was prohibited, so advertisers started using a clever loophole - mentioning a company or product's name without explicitly selling that product. The jingle was born, and I don’t think that it is a coincidence that extremly catchy songs that maximized memorableness came into being right after the Zeigarnik effect was discovered! The single most important action of a jingle is that it must become indelibly stuck in the customer’s head, and elicit sufficient positive emotions that they then associate with the product being sold. Repetition, alliteration and onomatopaeia are the most commonly employed devices of jingle writers, but apparently in terms of the tune, the most effective jingles are those which elicit a sense of incompleteness, for example by ending on an up note. The Salem jingle, and every jingle written by Steve Karmen, contains a subversion of expectation that catches in the mind, using the power of interruption to make something easier to recall.
The Zeigarnik effect is also the power behind TV series, which use the effect of episodes often ending in cliffhangers to urge viewers to watch the next episode. It has been used in email marketing, for example with Amazon and other online retailers sending emails reminding customers of items left in their carts without completing the purchase, using the power of incompleteness to add a sense of importance to things that clearly the client didn’t think were that important the first time round! Finally, in email publicity, many websites' landing pages offer a limited amount of free content, but to get the rest (like a full program or course), the user is pushed to sign up or purchase. Or they have the famous ‘countdown clock’ for limited-time events, again using the Zeigarnik effect to add importance and memorability.
OK, so the Zeigarnik effect is a powerful marketing tool. In fact, it is incredibly powerful altogether: recent research suggests that incomplete tasks are remembered up to 90% better than completed tasks! With all that power, is it only a toy? I feel that the more we dig in to the way memory works, the more we understand that the Zeigarnik effect has powerful implications. When the mind has experienced a great trauma, such as a warzone or a violent attack, the mind often struggles to obtain a sense of emotional completeness because the event is too complex and represents too great of an ‘interruption’ to be processed. We talk about ‘getting closure’, but when we understand the process of memory - short-term memory - involved in the Zeigarnik effect - which retains information very accurately, right in the forefront of the mind, and long-term memory which tags the event as a past events, acquired knowledge, or a learned skill - a different picture emerges. Generally, in order to pass into the long-term memory and so become more ‘plastic’ and less ‘immediate’, the Zeigarnik effect suggests that the mind needs to undergo a sense of completion. Also, in order to get stored as a past event and not as ‘an event that is still happening’, the brain needs a sense of completness or closure - exactly like for the waiter just after the order was delivered. Therefore, PTSD - where events are relived not as memories but as short-term ‘flashes’ as if they are physically happening in front of the person - arises from the fact that thanks to the Zeigarnik effect, that ‘interrupted’ event is still being re-lived and ‘ruminated on’ as an incomplete task. That is why flashbacks seem so ‘real’ - because the brain doesn’t recognize them as a memory or a past event, but the mind is keeping the memory fresh because it has filed it, thanks to the Zeigarnik effect, under ‘incomplete business’, which does not allow for the stretching of time necesary for it to become a memory. It is stored with immediacy and accuracy, rather than reviewed through the misted lense of memory. I actually thought that I came up with this idea myself - it seems so obvious and yet so revolutionary, that it is not so much the trauma as the ‘incompleteness’ of being unable to ‘digest’ the event, that keeps it fresh in the mind, but I have noticed that other thinkers in the field have also started to consider this as a possibility. To me, the implication that ‘trauma’ does not ‘break’ a person’s mental faculties, but rather that PTSD is a function of a normally working memory trying to mantain an incomplete event in the forefront of the mind, is a breakthrough. Our minds are not at war with us, and they are not ‘destroyed’ by trauma, but continue to work fantastically as they have always worked, in exactly the same way as they’d make us remember an incomplete order if we were a waiter in a crowded restaurant!
Another application where I think the Zeigarnik effect is particularly useful is the concept of ‘trauma bonding’. This concept, particularly beloved of those who try to untangle the complex trauma of those involved with narcissitic individuals (often while simultaneously pathologizing the victim in every which way in the process) basically suggests that the reason why people find it so difficult to separate from narcissists and remain caught up in a continuing emotional cycle, is due to the common (by narcissists) use of harsh treatment interspersed with very small kindnesses. This is a pattern that anyone who has seen it will recognize instantly, as is the pattern that if the narcissist does leave, they do so abruptly without any explanation, apologies or closure. The fact that the victim cannot help but get sucked back in, constantly ruminating about the person who discarded them and practically begging to be let back in, is not because they’re a sucker for punishment or even because they are ‘indelibly bonded’ to the narcissist, but simply because the narcissist has left the victim with a huge cliffhanger, which makes it impossible to file them as a memory! In other words, the victim is stuck in an endless Zeigarnik effect, where everything about the entire narcissistic experience will be lived as a flashback - physically and emotionally reliving every experience with them - rather than as a memory. And this isn’t because the narcissist was a glowing paragon of humanity or because they are ‘bonded’ to them in any way, but simply because the Zeigarnik effect won’t let you go of business that seems unfinished! The effect of being left by a narcissist, and PTSD, are identical (if on a smaller scale) - but the only thing they have in common is the Zeigarnik effect. Because the flashbacks and rumination are both caused by the same thing.
I think it would be enormous help to suffers both of narcissistic abuse and of PTSD, to realize that their brains are not in any way broken, that the horrific burden of flashbacks and obsession are not a sign of their inherent madness in any way, but rather a sign that their brain works as well as a skilled waiter’s or any person who ever remembers an advertising jingle. There is no mystery, and no brokeness, in that. There is only the hope that one day the mind will eventually make enough meaning to close the cycle, finish off the cliffhanger (and eventually it will make sense of it - even with basically nothing to go on, making up stories is not something any of us are bad at!) and the event will be filed with the rest of long-term memories, shifting, changing and quiet in the mists of time. If we realize that the way to treat PTSD is not trying to supress memories (which the Zeigarnik effect will not allow to be surpressed) but to give the Zeigarnik effect what it needs to resolve, which is to complete the interruption, we will get a lot closer to fixing the issue.
Another silly helping hand from the Zeigarnik effect is something I already did, but I didn’t realize it had a name. I’m sure that practically everyone who has ever had to memorize large volumes of information in a short amount of time has done the same thing! When trying to memorize a speech, intentionally stop rehearsing before fully memorizing it. Your memory will subconsciously dwell on the unfinished rehearsal, making you remember the speech better for the next practice session. I always used to say, don’t let me know more than 3 days ahead of time, because I knew from experience that I had to hit that knife-edge between forgetting and remembering for everything to be fully in the forefront of my mind. I’m sure we’ve all used the same thing in studying: memorize the first half, then take a break, then memorize the full amount during the next study session. Breaking the memorization into unfinished chunks capitalizes on the Zeigarnik effect.
The Zeigarnik effect has gained a reputation of being a cute little advertising tool. But I think something that gives you 90% better memory, and more than ‘memory’ but that holds something as fresh in the forefront of the mind, is far more powerful than an advertising tool and has far-reaching implications. At very least, it helps us to take trips down memory lane not fighting our memories but hand in hand with them, guiding them gently to the level of importance that we want them to occupy in our minds. In the (memorable) words of the character Dutch Van Der Linder in Red Dead Redemption: “We can’t always fight nature John. We can’t fight change. Can’t fight gravity. We can’t fight nothin’…” Indeed, with the Zeigarnik effect, we can’t fight nothing: but we can understand how it works, what it is, and use it to our advantage.