It’s hard to stop watching TV shows, and that’s by design. Each episode ends on some kind of cliffhanger. Key information gets withheld over the course of entire series — or, in the case of This Is Us, reserved for an episode right after the Super Bowl. The lack of resolution strings us along.
It actually hooks us on a psychological level, Carlijn Postma noted in her talk at Content Marketing World, “Binge Marketing: A Practical Guide to Building Your Brand With Serial Content.” Most of us have a strong, unspoken aversion to ambiguity, or, as social psychologist Arie Kruglanski put it in the 1990s, a “need for closure.”
