Do you like book spoilers?

First aired on Q (25/8/11)

It's a common experience. You're a season behind on Breaking Bad or Mad Men, but your friends, family and the internet have all moved on. So what do you do? You fight to preserve your unspoiled enjoyment of the show. You scour headlines for spoiler alerts. You cut your friends off mid-sentence. You're determined to not know what happens before you experience it for yourself.

Why? It seems obvious: not knowing what happens adds to the enjoyment of watching or reading as it unfolds. But is this really the case? The answer, according to research out of the University of California at San Diego, is no. In fact, the opposite is true. A new study shows that a spoiler might make your experience more enjoyable.

The study, which gave undergraduate students a set of short stories — one that artfully contained spoilers and one that did not — found that, on average, reading the stories with the spoilers was more enjoyable than those without.

Jonah Lehrer agrees. The Wired contributor and author of How We Decide, who did not work on the study, is an avid seeker of spoilers himself. "When we have no idea how it's going to end, we're not actually enjoying that show as much as we might be if we had some semblance of how we might end," he explained to Q guest Terry O'Reilly in a recent interview. "Really not knowing, being in that state of limbo, being in that state of total uncertainty, is not very pleasurable."

Lehrer says that we only have to turn to the popularity of genre fiction to see this conclusion in action. Romances have happy endings. Tragedies have sad ones. Readers turn to romance, to mystery and to science fiction again and again because they know, in vague terms, how the story is going to end.

However, Lehrer is quick to point out that the most successful stories are those that build a narrative arc and then offer readers a satisfying conclusion to the story. Twist endings and surprise conclusions are not enjoyable to read and not satisfying to see play out. "We like our stories to not be completely unknowable," Lehrer said. "There is something reassuring about works of genre because they become attached to these known endings."

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