Spoilers freshen up stories

People who read the last page of a mystery novel first may be on to something. Giving away plot surprises generally makes readers like stories better, say psychology graduate student Jonathan Leavitt and psychologist Nicholas Christenfeld, both of the University of California, San Diego.

Volunteers especially enjoyed classic short stories, including mysteries and tales with ironic twists, after seeing spoiler paragraphs that revealed how the yarns ended, Leavitt and Christenfeld report in a paper published online August 12 in Psychological Science.

“Spoilers may enhance story enjoyment by making texts easier to read and understand, leading to deeper comprehension, or they may reduce readers’ anxiety about what’s to come, allowing them to focus on a story’s aesthetic details,” Leavitt says. These responses could explain why a favorite book can be read many times with undiminished pleasure, he suggests.

It’s also possible that spoilers amplify stories’ appeal by increasing tension, Leavitt adds. Giving away the ending of, say, Oedipus Rex may elicit pleasurable tension as a reader contemplates the title character marching unknowingly to his doom.

“The impact of suspense on enjoyment seems likely to be more complicated than the simple take-home point of this new article,” remarks psychologist Leigh Ann Vaughn of Ithaca College in New York. Spoilers may apply a pleasant oomph to well-told tales but could easily intensify readers’ distaste for unappealing or boring stories, Vaughn suggests.

Leavitt and Christenfeld recruited 819 college students to read short ironic-twist tales, mysteries and literary stories. For each story, the researchers created a spoiler paragraph that revealed the outcome in a seemingly inadvertent way. Data from students who had previously read these stories were excluded.

Each volunteer read one story after reading a spoiler beforehand, a second story with the spoiler incorporated as the opening paragraph and a third narrative with no spoiler.

Some spoilers in the new study revealed ironic plot twists, such as mentioning that a condemned man’s apparent escape from hanging is just a momentary fantasy, or they demystified crimes, such as divulging that an apparent target of attempted murder turned out to be the perpetrator.

Spoilers also spiced up subtler stories. One paragraph overtly disclosed that a teenage boy and girl watching a couple struggle with a baby were glimpsing their own future, while the couple relived their own past upon seeing the teens.

Overall, participants reported liking all stories best after first reading spoilers. Spoilers incorporated into the beginning of the text had no effect on story enjoyment, yielding no more pleasure than unspoiled stories.

That result may be due to peoples’ general belief that spoilers ruin stories. So giving away outcomes in a way that seems unintended — as in artfully worded prefatory paragraphs or book reviews — may be necessary to enrich reader satisfaction, Leavitt proposes.

Birthday presents wrapped in cellophane, like stories preceded by spoilers, would give recipients an unexpected thrill, he predicts. “In both cases, the outcome is known, yet there is still pleasure in unraveling the clues, or the plastic wrap, as the case may be,” Leavitt says.