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Story Spoilers Don't Spoil Stories

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Jonathan D Leavitt at University of California, San Diego
Jonathan D Leavitt
Nicholas J. S. Christenfeld at University of California, San Diego
Nicholas J. S. Christenfeld
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Psychological Science
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/08/09/0956797611417007
The online version of this article can be found at:
DOI: 10.1177/0956797611417007
published online 12 August 2011Psychological Science
Jonathan D. Leavitt and Nicholas J. S. Christenfeld
Story Spoilers Don't Spoil Stories
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DOI: 10.1177/0956797611417007
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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 enjoyment of fiction through books, television, and mov-
ies may depend, in part, on the psychological experience of
suspense. Spoilers give away endings before stories begin, and
may thereby diminish suspense and impair enjoyment; indeed,
as the term suggests, readers go to considerable lengths to
avoid prematurely discovering endings. Transportation, a dis-
tinct form of story engagement associated with vivid imagery
and enhanced enjoyment (Green, Brock, & Kaufman, 2004),
is highly associated with suspense via close attention to the
unfolding plot and interest in how it will be resolved (Tal-Or
& Cohen, 2010). However, people’s ability to reread stories
with undiminished pleasure, and to read stories in which the
genre strongly implies the ending, suggests that suspense
regarding the outcome may not be critical to enjoyment and
may even impair pleasure by distracting attention from a
story’s relevant details and aesthetic qualities. In complex sto-
ries, developments hazy in their implications on first read are
readily understood when the narrative is revisited, and nervous
stirrings of uncertainty may become warm anticipation of
coming events once the story is laid bare.
Reading a story with foreknowledge of its outcome may be
analogous to perceptual fluency, in which perceived objects are
processed with ease, an experience that is associated with aes-
thetic pleasure (Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 2004), positive
affect (Winkielman & Cacioppo, 2001), and story engagement
(Vaughn, Childs, Maschinski, Niño, & Ellsworth, 2010).
Schema discrepancy theory suggests that increased predictabil-
ity can result in increased positivity of affective response,
although this effect is dependent on initial level of uncertainty
(MacDowell & Mandler, 1989). Thus, despite intuitive beliefs
about the effects of spoilers, there are plausible theoretical rea-
sons to think they may not ruin the pleasure of reading a story.
Their actual effect remains unknown. We conducted three
experiments, each with stories from a different, distinct genre,
to test the effects of spoilers on enjoyment.
Method
Participants (176 male, 643 female) were recruited from the
psychology subject pool at the University of California, San
Diego. They took part in three experiments in which they read
three different sorts of short stories―ironic-twist stories, mys-
teries, and more evocative literary stories. For each story, we
created a spoiler paragraph that briefly discussed the story and
revealed the outcome in a way that seemed inadvertent. These
paragraphs were designed so that they could work as either
independent text or the openings of the stories (as though the
stories were intrinsically spoiled).
Each experiment included four stories selected from anthol-
ogies. Each subject read three of these stories, one spoiled
(with the spoiler paragraph presented before the story), one
unspoiled (with the story presented without alteration), and
one in which the spoiler paragraph was incorporated as the
opening paragraph. Story, order, and condition were counter-
balanced such that each story was presented with equal fre-
quency across positions and conditions. Each version of each
story was read and rated for enjoyment (on a 10-point scale
ranging from 1, lowest rating, to 10, best rating) by at least 30
subjects. The stories were by such authors as John Updike,
Roald Dahl, Anton Chekhov, Agatha Christie, and Raymond
Carver, and ranged from 1,381 to 4,220 words. Subjects indi-
cated whether they had read any story previously, and if they
had, their data for that story (< 3% of ratings) were excluded
from analyses. Subjects were also provided the opportunity to
respond freely about each story.
Results
For all three experiments, analyses of variance revealed a sig-
nificant effect of condition. (In order to control for variability
between stories, we analyzed the data by comparing different
versions of the same story.) Subjects significantly preferred
spoiled over unspoiled stories in the case of both the ironic-
twist stories (6.20 vs. 5.79), p = .013, Cohen’s d = 0.18, and
the mysteries (7.29 vs. 6.60), p = .001, d = 0.34. The evocative
stories were appreciated less overall, likely because of their
more expressly literary aims, but subjects again significantly
preferred spoiled over unspoiled versions (5.50 vs. 5.03),
Corresponding Author:
Jonathan D. Leavitt, Department of Psychology, University of California,
San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093
E-mail: jleavitt@ucsd.edu
Story Spoilers Don’t Spoil Stories
Jonathan D. Leavitt and Nicholas J. S. Christenfeld
University of California, San Diego
Received 4/4/11; Revision accepted 5/26/11
Short Report
Psychological Science OnlineFirst, published on August 12, 2011 as doi:10.1177/0956797611417007
by Nicholas Christenfeld on August 31, 2011pss.sagepub.comDownloaded from
2 Leavitt, Christenfeld
p = .019, d = 0.22. In all three story types, incorporating spoiler
texts into stories had no effect on how much they were liked,
ps > .4. Subjects also did not indicate in their free responses
that they found these altered beginnings out of place or jarring.
Figure 1 shows the ratings for the spoiled and unspoiled ver-
sions of each story.
Conclusions
Writers use their artistry to make stories interesting, to engage
readers, and to surprise them, but we found that giving away
these surprises makes readers like stories better. This was true
whether the spoiler revealed a twist at the end (e.g., that the
condemned man’s daring escape is just a fantasy as the rope
snaps taut around his neck) or solved the crime (e.g., Poirot
discovers that the apparent target of attempted murder was in
fact the perpetrator). It was also true when the spoiler was
more poetic, as when frisky adolescents watching a couple
struggle with a baby are revealed to be previewing their own
futures, and the couple glimpsing their own pasts. In all these
types of stories, spoilers may allow readers to organize devel-
opments, anticipate the implications of events, and resolve
ambiguities that occur in the course of reading.
It is possible that spoilers enhance enjoyment by actually
increasing tension. Knowing the ending of Oedipus Rex may
heighten the pleasurable tension caused by the disparity in
knowledge between the omniscient reader and the character
marching to his doom. This notion is consistent with the assertion
that stories can be reread with no diminution of suspense
(Carroll, 1996). Although our results suggest that people
are wasting their time avoiding spoilers, our data do not
suggest that authors err by keeping things hidden. Stories
that open by revealing outcomes may lead readers to antici-
pate additional revelations at the end; in other words, readers
do not expect a story to provide complete premature knowledge
of its ending the way an external source might. Indeed, it
was only spoilers external to the stories that enhanced
readers’ delight; there was no benefit to our editing the stories
themselves.
Erroneous intuitions about the nature of spoilers may per-
sist because individual readers are unable to compare spoiled
and unspoiled experiences of a novel story. Other intuitions
about suspense may be similarly wrong: Perhaps birthday
presents are better when wrapped in cellophane, and engage-
ment rings when not concealed in chocolate mousse.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interest with
respect to their authorship or the publication of this article.
References
Carroll, N. (1996). The paradox of suspense. In P. Vorderer, H. J.
Wulff, & M. Friedrichsen (Eds.), Suspense: Conceptualization,
theoretical analysis, and empirical explorations (pp. 71–90).
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Green, M. C., Brock, T. C., & Kaufman, G. F. (2004). Understand-
ing media enjoyment: The role of transportation into narrative
worlds. Communication Theory, 14, 311–327.
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
“A Dark Brown Dog”
“Owl Creek Bridge”
“Lamb to the Slaughter”
“The Bet”
“Blitzed”
“A Chess Problem”
“McHenry's Gift”
“Rhyme Never Pays”
“The Calm”
“Good Dog”
“Plumbing”
“Up at a Villa”
Mean Hedonic Rating
Spoiled Unspoiled
Ironic-
Twist Stories
Literary Stories
Mysteries
Fig. 1. Hedonic ratings of the individual spoiled and unspoiled stories. Error bars represent standard
errors.
by Nicholas Christenfeld on August 31, 2011pss.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Story Spoilers Don’t Spoil Stories 3
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and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver’s processing expe-
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by Nicholas Christenfeld on August 31, 2011pss.sagepub.comDownloaded from
... Spoilers: Spoilers are seen as a high-stakes issue when they are about the death of a major character, and consumers can take precautions to avoid learning about the endings of their media narratives prematurely. However, recent research suggests that knowing the outcome of a narrative does not change the pleasure of being exposed to it (Leavitt & Christenfeld, 2011), and in some cases, it might actually enhance enjoyment (Johnson & Rosenbaum, 2015). ...
... Although the mentioned research (Johnson & Rosenbaum, 2015;Leavitt & Christenfeld, 2011) suggests otherwise, in the study data the commenters were generally angry at being exposed to spoilers, and the general consensus was that spoilers undermined the effects of character deaths: "not sure if I want to keep going now"; "Unfortunately I knew about it happening so when it happened it didn't affect me all"; "Wait a minute…Aeris dies???..Thanks for the spoiler alert asshats."; "maybe because I knew she was going to die, I didn't allow myself to get emotionally invested in her character"; I was at the first season and i was checking who was Marissa's actress and google search results gave me the spoiler that she died […] It ruined the show for me." ...
... Spoilers: Before being exposed to death, consumers will either interact with or try to avoid spoilers. Giving or avoiding spoilers on social media has been a major discussion point for audiences; however, research suggests that spoilers do not diminish the effects of narratives (Leavitt & Christenfeld, 2011), and in fact, in certain cases, they may actually enhance enjoyment (Johnson & Rosenbaum, 2015). While experiencing the death sequence, viewers will usually be moved by and remember aural cues, specifically the music that is used. ...
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... However, while some research has shown that spoilers that reveal the ending of a story can indeed decrease the enjoyment of a narrative (Rosenbaum & Johnson, 2016), other research has found the opposite (M. E. Ellithorpe & Brookes, 2018;Leavitt & Christenfeld, 2011. Recent scholarship examining how the nature (major, minor) and placement (middle or end) of a spoiler influences enjoyment produced similarly contradictory findings (Johnson et al., 2020;Levine et al., 2016). ...
... The field of research into spoilers has grown exponentially in the past 10 years, including work that examines the relationship between spoilers and processing fluency. However, most of the experiment-based studies conducted to date rely on participants' interactions with written short stories (e.g., Johnson & Rosenbaum, 2015;Leavitt & Christenfeld, 2011Levine et al., 2016;Rosenbaum & Johnson, 2016), movie posters (e.g., Johnson & Rosenbaum, 2018), specific movie scenes (Johnson et al., 2020), or trailers (e.g., Kryston et al., 2022). Studies that do examine participants' experiences with "real" media content have to date taken the shape of surveys where respondents report their fluency and enjoyment after the actual viewing (e.g., M. E. Ellithorpe & Brookes, 2018;Johnson & Rosenbaum, 2018, Study 3). ...
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