Fulbright College Research Team Explores How Spoilers Affect Reading Enjoyment

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Bill Levine

Spoiler alert: Published research showing short story spoilers enhance reading enjoyment may be overstated.

That's the conclusion reached by University of Arkansas researchers in "The Effects of Spoilers on the Enjoyment of Short Stories," published in Discourse Processes in October. An online version was published in January 2016.

William Levine, associate professor in the Department of Psychological Science in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, worked with Honors College student Michelle Betzner, who graduated in 2015, and former graduate student Kevin Autry to research the effect of spoilers on readers' enjoyment.

Their project built on previous findings by researchers J.D. Leavitt and N.S Christenfeld that found spoilers increased enjoyment of ironic twist, mystery, and literary stories — perhaps because spoilers raised readers' processing fluency, the authors posited.

This is contrary to the common sense understanding of spoilers - so named because they are assumed to spoil the story, Levine pointed out. "But we're not usually allowed to publish only our intuitions, so we decided to replicate the experiment," he said.

Levine and his students replicated some of the methods of the original experiment by using a no-spoiler control condition and a single question to assess enjoyment. They used different stories and wrote their own spoilers. They also introduced a mid-story spoiler, hypothesizing that this would impact enjoyment even more than a spoiler at the start.

"We thought that giving them the spoiler in the middle of the story would be really bad for enjoyment of that story, because people are more invested by then," Levine said.

Researchers also sought to explore the fluency theory by measuring reading time.

Subjects read three short stories in the ironic twist category — one with no spoiler, one with a spoiler at the start, and one with a mid-story spoiler. They also completed three assessments used by researchers to gauge reader characteristics: The Need for Cognition scale measures the reader's enjoyment of thinking; the Author Recognition Test measures previous exposure to print; and transportability measures the degree to which readers get lost in the world of the story.

Consistent with the intuitions of many, spoilers at the start of a story reduced reading enjoyment, researchers found. Mid-story spoilers had no discernable effect. Results from the three measures of reader characteristics were not informative, indicating a need for further study.

Levine's research group isn't able to specify why their results differed from those found by Leavitt and Christenfeld, though methodological factors might play a part.

In Levine's study, the subjects read the stories on a computer rather than in print, for example, and researchers used different stories. The participants in the two studies were also from different universities. The most obvious difference might be the format of the spoiler itself: the spoiler was a sentence in the U of A study, whereas a more thematic short paragraph was used by Leavitt and Christenfeld.

The U of A study will be continued with another honors student next fall, Levine said. This time, researchers will be examining the effect of different types of spoilers on the enjoyment of stories, as well as trying to understand further what reader characteristics might modulate the effect of spoilers.