This is because the unfinished task triggers a feeling of tension, which gets associated with the task and keeps it lingering in our minds. A lab study was run to examine this phenomenon, and it showed that people tend to remember uncompleted tasks, like half-finished math or word problems, better than completed tasks. Lewin had noticed that waiters in his local cafe seemed to have better recollections of unpaid orders than of those already settled. In the 1930s, Bluma Zeigarnik, a student of Lewin's in Berlin, designed a famous study to test the impact of this idea of tension and coherence. At its core it is the drive to reduce the tension, disorientation, and dissonance that come from complexity, incoherence, and contradiction. It is what we call the 'press for coherence.' It has been called many different things in psychology: consonance, need for closure, congruity, harmony, need for meaning, the consistency principle. What I am describing is a very basic human psychological process, captured by the second Gestalt principle. We REALLY like it when things come together. And when we do solve these puzzles, there's relief. So we feel compelled to reduce it, solve it, complete it, reconcile it, make it make sense. This sense of confusion triggers in a us a feeling of noxious anxiety. And we especially do not like it when things are contradictory, because then it is much harder to reconcile them (this is particularly true for Westerners). That is why most popular movies have Hollywood endings. We do not like it when things do not come together and fit nicely for us. “Most of us do not like not being able to see what others see or make sense of something new.
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