Stop Worrying About Spoilers--They Actually Help You Enjoy the Story More

It is a truth universally acknowledged that pretty much everyone hates spoilers. The internet was furious with former Detroit Tigers player Michael Sams for accidentally tweeting a major spoiler for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. And this week we learned about a vengeful ex-girlfriend who deliberately spoils Game of Thrones for her former paramour each week.

But maybe we should all just chill the fuck out, because it turns out that spoilers could actually enhance our enjoyment of our favorite show. That’s the message of a new video from the University of California, San Diego, highlighting the work of psychology professor Nicholas Christensen over the last five years or so.

Christensen 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 when they were done. The other group received a short introduction that deliberately “spoiled” the narrative before they read the stories and rated them. The result: almost all the participants said they enjoyed the spoiled stories more

Christenfeld followed up two years later with a study in the Scientific Study of Literature. [PDF] This time, he didn’t let participants from the “spoiled” group finish reading the stories before asking them to rate their enjoyment. The idea was to determine whether the enhanced enjoyment came just from knowing the ending. That turned out not to be the case. 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.

So what’s going on? Christenfeld thinks that spoilers free us up from having to pay too close attention to the plot, thereby enabling us to focus on other, richer aspects of the book, film, or TV show of choice—character development, sensory descriptions, or minor details we may have missed the first (or second) time around. “If you’re driving up Highway 1 through Big Sur [in California], and you know the road really well, you can now peek around and admire the view, the otters frolicking in the surf,” he said. But the first time you drive that route, you’re focusing almost entirely on all the twists and turns, and you miss all that scenic detail.

Christenfeld points to the 1995 film The Usual Suspects as a case in point, where the identity of arch-villain Keyser Soze isn’t known until the final scene. SPOILER ALERT: Keyser Soze is Kevin Spacey. Christenfeld maintains that knowing this doesn’t ruin our pleasure from watching the film. “There’s lots of evidence that this fluent processing of information is pleasurable; that is, some familiarity with a work of art enables you to enjoy it more,” he said.

As someone who definitely enjoys rewatching my favorite films and TV series, I understand what Christenfeld is saying. But I also know that part of the enhanced pleasure I get from subsequent viewings is linked to remembering how I felt being surprised the first time around. In other words, we may get richer and deeper appreciation out of subsequent viewings, but there’s still something special about that first time. I may enjoy rewatching past seasons of Game of Thrones, but this Angeleno still studiously avoids Twitter on nights when new episodes air, solely to avoid spoilers from East Coast viewers.

Christenfeld acknowledged it was an interesting question. “We do know that the reason spoiled stories in our experiment were preferred was not based on readers’ nostalgic memories of the first unspoiled reading, since the first time they read them was with us [and they were spoiled],” he told Gizmodo. “So it does seem that if you are going to read a story once, it should be spoiled. However, if you are going to read it many times, it is still possible that you should make one of those times unspoiled”—just for variety.

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.” We look forward to hearing about those results.

I haven't finished reading this yet, so no one spoil it for me.

It says that you like things more of they are spoiled beforehand. It uses SCIENCE to make the point.

No need to thank me. Just knowing you will enjoy reading it more is reward enough.

The article doesn't say that. It reports on a study that says that, and then editorializes along the lines of "Yeaahhh, I dunno ..."

The frustrating thing about spoilers is that the burden is placed in the person who doesn't want to be spoiled. Aside from the big Marvel and DC things this week, I had the most recent Game of Thrones death spoiled less than an hour after it aired and the Flash reveal in the same amount of time, just by going on Facebook. And the default argument is "buoy should know to stay off social media" as if that's the only reason I go on there.

OK, I get that. Then my questions are, what should be an acceptable amount of time before anything can be freely discussed and how should it be enforced?

I think at least a week is reasonable.

Honestly I wish Facebook and Twitter would set up a filter so that you could type in the name of the show or movie and it would hide any posts related to that.

What about the companies? Today there was a FB entry from DC Comics about Wally's return. Or even the news. I saw the stuff about Cap today in the crawler of a random news report.



There are tons of those: https://www.facebook.com/SpoilerShield

But seriously, I think it's easier to convince Republicans to vote for Clinton than to reach an agreement between those who say spoilers are good or neutral and those who think they actually spoil stuff.

It's gotten a bit out of hand lately, with some people developing a Chuck McGill-ian sensitivity to "spoilers". The Breaking Bad thread is full of tags, and it's about a show that ended years ago. A while ago Jay tagged something from The Fountainhead, even though it's fair to say that if by now someone hasn't read a 50 year old novel it's because they don't much interest in doing so.

I saw quite a few complaining about having Wonder Woman/Doomsday and Spider-Man/Black Panther in the trailers because they were huge spoilers and what a poor job the studios did in keeping the "mystery" of those movies.

Somehow, it's becoming more and more about the "spoiler" than the actual story. I can understand it with something like Game of Thrones that is 90% shock and 10% actual good writing, but it's the same way about everything.

I see your point. I think it cuts both ways.

I confess, I probably agree with you that the whining about it is somewhat overblown. The last two times I was really excited about a movie and wanted to go in as fresh as possible were "Into Darkness" and "Days of Future Past," and in both cases I was able to avoid Spoilers pretty well. I knew virtually nothing about "Days" when I went to go see it, and I found it funny when everybody was mocking JJ Abrams for doing such a terrible job of keeping the Khan reveal under wraps. I just avoided anything to do with the promotion for the film and lo and behold, I didn't know going in that it was going to be Khan. It's actually fairly easy to avoid these things if you really want to. These days, we all know that if we go poking around for info about a movie before it comes out, we'll probably find spoilers. If that kind of thing bothers you, just avoid it.

(I did have the Wolverine cameo in "First Class" spoiled for me, and that one still pisses me off. The whole point of a cameo like that is the surprise of it, and it was dickish of people to go on Facebook and make a point of spoiling it.)

You're right that it shouldn't be about the "spoiler" instead of the story, but the two are not mutually exclusive, and writers craft stories with an eye toward people experiencing them in the sequence they've been written. Not everything is "Romeo and Juliet," where the opening prologue tells you that the story ends with the title characters dying. The emotional effect of a story turn is an element of the whole cumulative effect of the experience of story. And this is true even if the story-turn in question is one you could have predicted. There's a difference between seeing something happen that you predicted probably would, and seeing something happen that you already know for a fact is going to happen, because it's been spoiled.

For my part, especially now that I see so few movies, I don't do a lot of "predicting," and I tend to let a film's story just kind of wash over me, and part of the fun (don't say "fun," say "good") is not knowing about what's going to happen until it happens in the moment. It often makes for a more involving, more visceral experience of the story.

Knowing something happens is meaningless to me because what I care is how something happens.

False. Depends on whether one has comprehension problems.

I see your point. I think it cuts both ways.

I confess, I probably agree with you that the whining about it is somewhat overblown. The last two times I was really excited about a movie and wanted to go in as fresh as possible were "Into Darkness" and "Days of Future Past," and in both cases I was able to avoid Spoilers pretty well. I knew virtually nothing about "Days" when I went to go see it, and I found it funny when everybody was mocking JJ Abrams for doing such a terrible job of keeping the Khan reveal under wraps. I just avoided anything to do with the promotion for the film and lo and behold, I didn't know going in that it was going to be Khan. It's actually fairly easy to avoid these things if you really want to. These days, we all know that if we go poking around for info about a movie before it comes out, we'll probably find spoilers. If that kind of thing bothers you, just avoid it.

(I did have the Wolverine cameo in "First Class" spoiled for me, and that one still pisses me off. The whole point of a cameo like that is the surprise of it, and it was dickish of people to go on Facebook and make a point of spoiling it.)

You're right that it shouldn't be about the "spoiler" instead of the story, but the two are not mutually exclusive, and writers craft stories with an eye toward people experiencing them in the sequence they've been written. Not everything is "Romeo and Juliet," where the opening prologue tells you that the story ends with the title characters dying. The emotional effect of a story turn is an element of the whole cumulative effect of the experience of story. And this is true even if the story-turn in question is one you could have predicted. There's a difference between seeing something happen that you predicted probably would, and seeing something happen that you already know for a fact is going to happen, because it's been spoiled.

For my part, especially now that I see so few movies, I don't do a lot of "predicting," and I tend to let a film's story just kind of wash over me, and part of the fun (don't say "fun," say "good") is not knowing about what's going to happen until it happens in the moment. It often makes for a more involving, more visceral experience of the story.