Would You Like Me to Spoil “Avengers: Infinity War” For You?

How would you feel if I spoiled the entire plot of the upcoming “Avengers: Infinity War” for you right now? Probably pretty upset. I sure would be. I’ve waded through 18 movies over ten years, all building to this one event, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to have it ruined for me now.

But a lot of people, surprisingly, don’t feel this way at all. In fact, the writers of “Westworld” recently made a post on Reddit offering to spoil the entire second season if the fan community decided that was what they really wanted, the logic being that if spoilers were out in the wild, it would be easier to flag and avoid them. Sure enough, the next day, they posted this video:

Spoiler alert: The whole thing ended up being an elaborate hoax. But what if there was something to the idea?

Recent research by Leavitt and Christenfeld (2011, 2013) found that audiences actually enjoyed stories more if they were spoiled ahead of time. The theoretical support for this finding was that people tend to enjoy things more when they’re familiar, it’s easier to pay attention to the details of a story when you already know the broad strokes, and it’s easier to get immersed in the story when it’s already familiar.

On the other hand, Johnson and Rosenbaum (2015), in attempting to replicate the initial 2011 study by Leavitt and Christenfeld, found the opposite–people do, in fact, enjoy stories less after they’ve been spoiled. Almost every dimension of enjoyment was lower for the group that had had their stories spoiled, from whether they felt suspense, to whether they were moved by the story, to whether they simply had fun. The Leavitt and Christenfeld study simply asked participants to rate their enjoyment on a 10-point scale, while Johnson and Rosenbaum had participants rate different aspects of enjoyment, which may account for the difference.

Either way, it is surprising that the research isn’t more clear about the impact of spoilers. In looking into this topic for the post, I found that there wasn’t much research yet at all. Leavitt and Christenfeld appear to be among the first to actually conduct experiments to find out what effect spoilers have. It is probably the case that some people just like spoilers and others don’t, but as ads get increasingly targeted, it will be interesting to see if some trailers get more or less spoilery to appeal to different types of people.

References

Johnson, B. K., & Rosenbaum, J. E. (2015). Spoiler alert: Consequences of narrative spoilers for dimensions of enjoyment, appreciation, and transportation. Communication Research, 42(8), 1068-1088.

Leavitt, J. D., & Christenfeld, N. J. (2011). Story spoilers don’t spoil stories. Psychological science, 22(9), 1152-1154.

Leavitt, J. D., & Christenfeld, N. J. (2013). The fluency of spoilers: Why giving away endings improves stories. Scientific Study of Literature, 3(1), 93-104.