http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/spoilers-dont-spoil-anything/
> "I’ve always assumed that this reading style is a perverse personal habit, a > symptom of a flawed literary intelligence. It turns out, though, that I was > just ahead of the curve, because spoilers don’t spoil anything. In fact, a > new study [upcoming in _Psychological Science_] suggests that spoilers can > actually *increase* our enjoyment of literature. Although we’ve long assumed > that the suspense makes the story — we keep on reading because we don’t know > what happens next — this new research suggests that the tension actually > detracts from our enjoyment. > > The experiment itself was simple: Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt > of UC San Diego gave several dozen undergraduates 12 different short stories. > The stories came in three different flavors: ironic twist stories (such as > Chekhov’s “The Bet”), straight up mysteries (“A Chess Problem” by Agatha > Christie) and so-called “literary stories” by writers like Updike and Carver. > Some subjects read the story as is, without a spoiler. Some read the story > with a spoiler carefully embedded in the actual text, as if Chekhov himself > had given away the end. And some read the story with a spoiler disclaimer in > the preface. > > ...The first thing you probably noticed is that people don’t like literary > stories. (And that’s a shame, because Updike’s “Plumbing” is a masterpiece of > prose: “All around us, we are outlasted….”) But you might also have noticed > that *almost every single story*, regardless of genre, was more pleasurable > when prefaced with a spoiler. This suggests that I read fiction the right > way, beginning with the end and working backwards. I like the story more > because the suspense is contained." -- gwern http://www.gwern.net _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
