Geek Tyrant point out the following study conducted at UC San Diego by psychology researchers Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt. The aim of it was to find out the effects of spoilers on people, and whether or not they do in fact end up ruining the enjoyment of a story, which in this case was in the form of a series of novels. Testing thirty people with three different stories, here are the results of the experiment.
Christenfeld and Leavitt ran three experiments with a total of 12 short stories. Three types of stories were studied: ironic-twist, mystery and literary. Each story – classics by the likes of John Updike, Roald Dahl, Anton Chekhov, Agatha Christie and Raymond Carver – was presented as-is (without a spoiler), with a prefatory spoiler paragraph or with that same paragraph incorporated into the story as though it were a part of it. Each version of each story was read by at least 30 subjects. Data from subjects who had read the stories previously were excluded.
Subjects significantly preferred the spoiled versions of ironic-twist stories, where, for example, it was revealed before reading that a condemned man's daring escape is all a fantasy before the noose snaps tight around his neck. Subjects read stories as-is and with introductory paragraphs that gave away the endings, or spoilers. In almost all cases, they preferred the "spoiled" stories. The same held true for mysteries. Knowing ahead of time that Poirot will discover that the apparent target of attempted murder is, in fact, the perpetrator not only didn't hurt enjoyment of the story but actually improved it. Subjects liked the literary, evocative stories least overall, but still preferred the spoiled versions over the unspoiled ones.
Why? The answers go beyond the scope of the study, but one possibility is perhaps the simplest one: that plot is overrated.
"Plots are just excuses for great writing. What the plot is is (almost) irrelevant. The pleasure is in the writing," said Christenfeld . . . It's also possible that it's "easier" to read a spoiled story. Other psychological studies have shown that people have an aesthetic preference for objects that are perceptually easy to process.
Basically, this shows that spoilers don't
actually spoil anything! Well, they do, but we just don't seem to mind all that much deep down. Despite the belief that finding out details about a movie before seeing it thereby "spoils" it, these results seemingly prove otherwise. Here's a recent example for you. Were you not more excited to see
X-Men: First Class after finding out about Wolverine's cameo? Or did knowing about it beforehand completely screw up the scene for you? Share your thoughts on this in the usual place.
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