The Effect of Spoilers on the Enjoyment of Short Stories

(Don’t) Tell Me How It Ends: Spoilers, Enjoyment, and Involvement in Television and Film

“…Whittlesea and Williams, 2000). In contrast, Levine et al (2016) found no effect on, or mediation via, processing fluency for spoiled short stories. However, they used a measure of reading time, which may instead reflect story involvement rather than poor fluency.…”

“…Yan and Tsang (2016) found that when a spoiler reveals the ending of a story, people will overestimate the impact on enjoyment, but when the spoiler reveals the process that leads to this outcome, people will underestimate how much this impacts their actual enjoyment. Levine et al (2016) demonstrated that blunter and more obvious spoilers are likely to produce negative effects. They also found that spoilers presented before a story did harm enjoyment, whereas spoilers presented midstory did not impact enjoyment.…”

“…In a separate process the need for cognition (NFC), defined as "the tendency for an individual to engage in and enjoy thinking" (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982, p. 116), interacted with spoilers such that people with a low need for cognition selected spoiled over unspoiled stories (Rosenbaum & Johnson, 2016). Levine et al (2016) observed a moderating effect of NFC on enjoyment, consistent with the pattern of results in Rosenbaum and Johnson (2016). However, as with earlier spoiler experiments, this evidence relies on the use of literary short stories as stimuli (Leavitt & Christenfeld, 2011).…”

“…Yan and Tsang (2016) further added to existing literature by investigating misforecasting, people's inability to properly predict the impact that spoilers will have on their enjoyment. Other findings have illustrated that the nature of spoilers (e.g., their construal level or placement) are important variables that influence the relationship between spoilers and enjoyment (Levine et al, 2016;Yan & Tsang, 2016).…”

“…that spoilers can ruin one's enjoyment (Johnson & Rosenbaum, 2015;Levine, Betzner, & Autry, 2016;Rosenbaum & Johnson, 2016).…”