Turns Out People Prefer Their Story Spoiled

E.T. goes home, Jack dies, the friends with benefits idea obviously fails and they fall in love, Kevin Spacey is murdered by Brad Pitt for putting Brad Pitt's dead wife's decapitated head inside of a box, they save Private Ryan, Tom Hanks gets off the island, Charlie wins the golden ticket, and ultimately, Willy Wonka gives the kid his chocolate factory.

Spoiler alert.

If you’re into that sort of thing, you might relish a bizarre and lively collection of websites that contain a veritable orgy of film climaxes:Movie Pooper, Spoiler TV, and The Movie Spoiler.com. And if you cover your ears when, say, someone tries to ruin Crazy Stupid Love by informing you of Steve Carell’s death by serpent in the last act (maybe?), science says that you are wasting your energy.

Before you read the study, I’m going to spoil it for you: two researchers in the psychology department of the University of California, San Diego, Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt, decided to assess the spoiler problem by running three experiments. Each revolved around 12 short stories including those with an ironic twist, a mystery and a literary read. Read by 30 individuals, the stories were given without a spoiler, and with a spoiler somewhat incorporated into the story. Afterwards, they found, subjects seemed to have favored the spoiled narratives.

And so they conclude that spoilers don't actually spoil stories, and that plot isn’t as important as it sounds. (Sorry Tolstoy.)

The finding seems to jibe with other psychological studies that have revealed that people have an aesthetic preference for — surprise — objects that are perceptually easy to process. Perhaps it is easier to read a story that's been spoiled. But doesn't that belittle all the thrill and tension that makes great literature and art so great? Isn't reading a novel or viewing a film all about the intense brainteasers that invite your own playground of theories and reasoning? That is, of course, up to you, dear reader.

On that note, here is a video in which 100 movies are spoiled in 10 seconds or something. I bet you are glad I spoiled it for you.

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