Zeigarnik Effect
noun

- the psychological tendency to remember an interrupted or unfinished task rather than a completed one.

- a psychological phenomenon in which people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.

- the tendency to recall uncompleted tasks more easily than completed ones because of the mental tension created by the lack of closure.

Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, Collins Dictionary

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PHRASE ORIGIN

The term "Zeigarnik Effect" is named after Bluma Zeigarnik (1900-1988), a Soviet psychologist who discovered this phenomenon in the 1920s. According to legend, Zeigarnik's doctoral supervisor, Kurt Lewin, noticed that a waiter at a Vienna café could remember complex unpaid orders in detail but forgot them immediately once customers had settled their bills. This observation inspired Zeigarnik to conduct systematic experiments at the University of Berlin.

In her 1927 research, Zeigarnik asked participants to complete simple tasks like solving puzzles and stringing beads. She interrupted them during half the tasks and allowed them to complete the others. When later asked to recall what they had worked on, participants remembered the interrupted tasks nearly twice as well as the completed ones—demonstrating what would become known as the Zeigarnik Effect.

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UNFINISHED BUSINESS

Our minds create what researchers call "cognitive tension" around incomplete work. This explains why we suddenly remember an email we meant to send whilst trying to fall asleep, or why a half-written report occupies our thoughts during lunch or dinner.

Writers and artists have long used this effect by stopping work mid-sentence or mid-sketch, knowing they'll return with momentum rather than facing a blank page. Ernest Hemingway famously stopped writing each day at a point where he knew what would happen next, making it easier to resume.

Media practioners exploit this tendency mercilessly. Every notification, every unread message, every partially watched video creates cognitive tension, pulling our attention back repeatedly. Understanding this helps explain why closing all our browser tabs or finishing a nagging task brings such disproportionate relief. That waiter's trick of forgetting paid orders wasn't a limitation—it was his brain efficiently clearing completed items to make room for new orders to be processed.

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

abandoned cart syndrome, cliffhanger effect, cognitive holding pattern, cognitive itch, cognitive tension, dangling threads, half-baked ideas, hanging fire, incomplete task memory, incompleteness bias, interrupted task effect, interrupted task recall, intrusive thoughts, leaving something hanging, loose ends, mental backlog, mental incompletion bias, open loop syndrome, open loops, resumption urge, task persistence bias, task persistence phenomenon, uncompleted task phenomenon, unfinished business, unfinished business effect, unfinished symphony, unresolved goal fixation, up in the air, ZEIGARNIK EFFECT

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SMUGGLE
 OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

"TV thriller writers are masters of the ZEIGARNIK EFFECT,... they always end an episode with an unresolved climax."

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P L E A S E   S U P P O R T   O W A D

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