Spoiler Alert! Knowing the End of a Story Makes It Better, Study Finds

TIME:

We might have to change the name of “spoilers” to “giveaways.” They may not be that bad after all.

A recent study shows that people enjoy movies, books and other stories when they know the ending ahead of time.

Nicholas Christenfeld, a University of California, San Diego professor of social psychology, along with Jonathan Leavitt, a PhD candidate at UC San Diego studying psychology, organized an experiment where volunteers were given three stories of different genres, written by well-known authors such as John Updike and Anton Chekhov. One of those stories had a spoiler in a separate paragraph, another had the spoiler worked into the opening paragraph and a last one did not have any hint of the ending. Participants typically enjoyed the stories with the spoiler at the very beginning the most, even when the story had an unexpected twist ending or was a murder mystery.

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