by Jean-Jacques COURTEY, Doctor in Economic Geography, Ph.D
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The "Zeigarnik effect" is drawing its name from her inventor, Bluma Zeigarnik (1900 -1988), a Russian-Lithuanian psychologist who studied in the Humboldt University of Berlin.
In 1927, she stressed in her thesis the importance of unachieved things, by studying notably waiters in coffee shops.
The rate of memorization of unachieved things (orders received), is almost twice as much the one of achieved things (orders completed) !
According to her final observations based upon a variety of experiments, the feeling of unachievement is more powerful than the opposite one, achievement.
The "Zeigarnik effect" has a lot to do with motivation, because without it, nothing would happen or work.
When something is achieved in your life, you can easily store it and somehow forget about it.
But when it's not the case, something stabbing is risking to occur, sometimes through whole generations, and not necessarily the closest ones !
This astonishing concept was brought to light during the interwar period, a time of mere illusions and uncertainties about social life and world peace.
Strangely, this very strong effect applying to everybody has been reduced nowadays to the side effects of multi-tasking, the struggle with excessive mail, and the right to disconnect from e-mails, or more positively, a way to develop creativity for a writer, for instance.
But the truth is that at its origin - so when e-mails didn't exist yet -, this concept was considered far more widely.
And Bluma Zeigarnik used it a lot when in return to Soviet Union, in Moscow.
It was integrated in her wider work, she called "Pathopsychology" (note the way words are reversed with the concept of "Psychopathology" used presently).
Even she was working for the Communist Academy of Moscow (in the departement of Natural Sciences, and then in the department of Psychology she co-founded), nolens volens she had to suffer herself with her family from the weight of history. Her husband who was yet a communist was arrested, and sentenced to 10 years jail in a goulag in 1940. And she had to survive with her two children, and suffer from the psychological effect she discovered.
So paradoxically, unachievement in a human life, or more widely say in a pretending revolutionary group - or at the opposite in an ex-bashed dynasty - as we are in the psychogenealogical domain, has got a tremendous importance.
Often, without being aware about it, we are all carrying the weight of our proximate or distant ancestors. Sometimes, we don't think much about them, but our surrounding may oblige us to do so, willy-nilly, even if it doesn't gain much in this process.
For example, in France, whatever the fact people are "ultras" of opposite sides, it is clear that the "Zeigarnik effect" is playing thoroughly.
Astonishingly, nobody seems able to point out this unique and comprehensive paradox, biding opposite camps in the same shadow.
And the phenomenon can agitate also any other country, even the most improbable.
As a matter of fact, the "Zeigarnik effect" can push people to act illogically, as if they had lost control on their prefrontal brain, and were using only the reptilian brain and amygdala (with their answers to a supposed threat : fight, freeze or flight).
Then, they seem to become the subjects of a powerful and unescapable force !
Ultimately, the more they are numerous, the more they can even end up to act against themselves, and their own personal interest unvolontarily. Sometimes, they are mocking in the back of someone, when they should realize they are taken the mickey out of - by lacking discernment and seeming so derisory.
The "Zeigarnik effect", is recognized as one of the most important cognitive laws of psychology !
The observable chaotic aspects of life in society are witnessing the operational power of this psychogenealogical effect.
The psychological mecanism is a determining collective factor, which turns out to be very difficult or even almost impossible to escape.
The "Zeigarnik effect" is so powerful, that it can affect historicity and even modify it frantically, if no diversion is given to feed its need for novelty !
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