Spoilers Don't Spoil Stories

A taxi driver drops a couple off at a theater to see a play which is a murder mystery. They pay the fare but don't leave a tip. The driver rolls down the window and shouts: "The butler did it." Did he get his own back?

Perhaps not! Graduate student Jonathan Leavitt and Professor Nicholas Christenfeld (2011) found that spoilers--which give away endings--don't spoil stories. Perhaps the taxi-driver's spoiler enabled the stingy couple to enjoy the play more than they would otherwise have done.

Leavitt and Christenfeld randomly assigned 819 participants each to read three short stories and to rate their enjoyment of each one. The stories, selected from anthologies, were by well-known authors, such as Agatha Christie and Anton Chekhov. Twelve stories were used in all, in three categories: ironic twist stories, mystery stories, and evocative-literary stories. Each participant read stories from just one category: one story presented as written by its author (unspoiled), one preceded by a paragraph that told the story's outcome (spoiled), and one in which spoiler information was incorporated into the story's first paragraph.

Of the 12 stories in the whole set, the four ironic stories and the four mystery stories were enjoyed significantly more when they were spoiled than when they were unspoiled. The four literary-evocative stories were also enjoyed more when spoiled than when unspoiled, but with these the effect was not statistically significant. For stories in which the outcome was edited into the stories' first paragraphs, enjoyment was the same as that of the unspoiled stories.

What does this mean? The authors suggest, and I think they are right, that a spoiler can allow readers to organize the structure of the story better and so, although intuitively we may think we read to see what will happen, really we may be reading to deepen our understanding. Perhaps this is many people like to read a review before they choose a book or a movie.

Although plot became, for a while, a four-letter word because some thought that it distracted people from the deeper aspects of fiction, this study indicates that the idea may have been mistaken. People may read for the deeper meanings of a story whether there is a what-happens-next aspect or not. Knowing what will happen can allow people a more thoughtful appreciation.

Leavitt, J. D., & Christenfeld, N. J. S. (2011). Story spoilers don't spoil stories. Psychological Science, 22, 1152-1154.