Public Release:  Spoiler alert: Stories are not spoiled by 'spoilers'

University of California - San Diego

Many of us go to extraordinary lengths to avoid learning the endings of stories we have yet to read or see - plugging our ears, for example, and loudly repeating "la-la-la-la," when discussion threatens to reveal the outcome. Of book and movie critics, we demand they not give away any plot twists or, at least, oblige with a clearly labeled "spoiler alert." We get angry with friends who slip up and spill a fictional secret.

But we're wrong and wasting our time, suggests a new experimental study from the University of California, San Diego. People who flip to the last page of a book before starting it have the better intuition. Spoilers don't spoil stories. Contrary to popular wisdom, they actually seem to enhance enjoyment.

Even ironic-twist and mystery stories - which you'd be forgiven for assuming absolutely depend on suspense or surprise for success - aren't spoiled by spoilers, according to a study by Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt of UC San Diego's psychology department, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science.

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.





"Plots are just excuses for great writing. What the plot is is (almost) irrelevant. The pleasure is in the writing," said Christenfeld, a UC San Diego professor of social psychology.


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.

"So it could be," said Leavitt, a psychology doctoral student at UC San Diego, "that once you know how it turns out, it's cognitively easier - you're more comfortable processing the information - and can focus on a deeper understanding of the story."



"Stories are a universal element of human culture, the backbone of the billion-dollar entertainment industry, and the medium through which religion and societal values are transmitted," the researchers write. In other words, narratives are incredibly important. But their success doesn't seem to hinge on simple suspense.

Christenfeld and Leavitt conclude the paper by saying that perhaps some of our "other intuitions about suspense may be similarly wrong."

"Perhaps," they write, "birthday presents are better when wrapped in cellophane, and engagement rings are better when not concealed in chocolate mousse."

We might be also well-advised to reconsider surprise parties, Christenfeld said. Meanwhile, he and Leavitt continue to investigate what makes stories work - or not. Numerous recent scandals about fictionalized memoirs have inspired them to explore why it matters that a story be true. "Why does it matter," Christenfeld said, "whether something happened to one person in five billion or to no one? If the story is still a good story, why do we care?"

