According to research by UC San Diego psychology professor Nicholas Christenfeld, spoilers don’t ruin a story: They make you enjoy it even more. One more spoiler: In the movie “The Usual Suspects,” Kevin Spacey is Keyser Söze. If you haven’t seen it yet, wow, you’re really going to love it now. Do spoilers actually ruin stories?
Even when asked to rate their pleasure halfway through the story, before the spoiled ending, subjects still enjoyed those stories more than unspoiled ones. What definitely doesn’t work is incorporating spoilers directly into the stories—that simply makes for bad storytelling. No need for miracles—EcoFlow will keep you powered on the darkest nights.
Christenfeld repeated the experiment with three different genres: mystery stories containing a “whodunit” moment; ironic twist stories, where a surprise ending crystallizes the whole story; and literary fiction with a neat resolution. “Across all three genres spoilers actually were enhancers,” said Christenfeld. “The term is wrong.”
Does the plot spoil the beauty? If spoiling key plot points improves a story, perhaps the plot itself is simply a distraction that keeps us from enjoying the rest of it – the sensory descriptions, the character development, the satire, the artistry.
Yes, they do. Basically, after you've heard a spoiler and you keep watching, you keep wondering "Will that happen now?" and you won't pay attention to the whole action like you used to.
In fact, spoilers may not be as bad for your enjoyment as you may think. There have been plenty of studies on spoilers that show they have a neutral or even positive effect on how much you enjoy something.
They found that people didn't just enjoy spoilers because they knew the ending, but that spoilers helped viewers or readers understand the overall narrative's purpose and incorporate all the details and plot points better. “If you know the ending as you watch it, you can understand what the filmmaker is doing.
Spoilers let you focus on other, less obvious elements of the story. “Because you don't have to pay attention to what's going to happen with the plot, you can pay attention to all these other things going on,” Cohen said. “And it that way, it can really enhance your appreciation of the story.”
So: when is it OK to spoil a film or TV show? The answer is after between three to five days, unless informed otherwise. However, please remember that spoilers are a two-way street. If you are particularly spoilerphobic, it is your responsibility to tread carefully.
Why do we hate spoilers? They give us beliefs before we've imagined all the interesting things in all the personally powerful ways. So if we hate spoilers, it's because we're creatures whose beliefs and imaginings interact to produce emotions in response to fiction. They just have to be sequenced in the right order.
This research suggests one explanation for why spoilers suck: They remind us that a story is just a story. It's hard to get transported when you already know where you'll end up—in real life you don't have that knowledge. Of course, not everyone shares my spoiler hatred.
People hate spoilers because they happen out of our control in situations we never anticipate about stories we love. Spoilers aren't sought-out, they're an unwanted experience that happens to you. None of that is reflected in this experiment (poor external validity).
Replace the thought of the spoiler with a different one. Try substituting the unwanted thought with a different one whenever it pops up. You could replace the memory of the spoiler with the plot of another TV show that you've already watched, for example. An alternative is to fill your mind with opposing thoughts.
Christenfeld published the results of his initial study on spoilers in Psychological Science back in 2011. [ PDF] For those three experiments, he and his UCSD colleague, Jonathan Leavitt, divided participants into two groups. One group read short stories from various genres (ironic-twist, mystery, and literary) and rated how much they liked them ...
Image: University of California, San Diego. It’s possible to test this aspect, simply by redoing the experiments, except this time subjects would repeatedly read the stories, with a sufficient delay between readings to ensure maximum pleasure in the re-exposure. Christenfeld pronounced it “an experiment worth doing.”.
So Christenfeld decided to put spoilers to the test in the most straightforward way possible: by spoiling stories for people. In the initial experiment, his team had subjects read short stories from various genres. One group simply read a story and rated how much they liked it at the end.
With a detective story, you can safely assume the detective will eventually solve the case. “The point is, really we're not watching these things for the ending,” said Christenfeld. “I point out to the skeptics, people watch these movies more than once happily, and often with increasing pleasure.”.
Christenfeld and Jonathan D. Leavitt found that across all three genres, spoilers enhanced the enjoyment of the stories. Source: Leavitt and Christenfeld, 2011. Ironically, a study about spoiling surprise endings had a surprise ending. In retrospect, Christenfeld thinks he should have seen it coming all along.