aaronwhite:

infoneer-pulse:

Spoilers Don’t Spoil Anything

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.

Here are the results.

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.

» via Wired

If it was good enough for the ancient Greeks, it’s good enough for us.

I’d love a compendium of these stories (with spoilers, please).