I’m Going to Spoil Your Favorite TV Show

NYT OPINION: I’m Going to Spoil Your Favorite TV Show
By Anna-Lisa Cohen
Section: Opinion
Source: New York Times
Published Date: May 8, 2023 at 03:00AM

Everyone gets mad about spoilers. But science suggests our concern about spoilers ruining our enjoyment of stories is overblown.

In this divisive era, when there are so few things we all still agree on, one point of basic civility stands unchallenged: You don’t mention the ending of a television show or movie if the person you’re talking with hasn’t seen it yet. It’s just basic human decency. Premature plot revelations are so far out of bounds that their name alone stands as a warning: spoilers. (On that note and before we go any further: Spoilers ahead.) In the past few weeks, a dramatic revelation in “Succession” reignited the debate over how long spoilers should be suppressed on social media — and whether having advance knowledge of a momentous plot development (in this case: Logan Roy dies) ruins our enjoyment of a story. Recently, my colleagues and I conducted research to address this very question. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t. In a study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, my co-authors and I had people watch a suspenseful 30-minute TV episode directed by Alfred Hitchcock titled “Bang! You’re Dead.” Our purpose was to determine the extent to which knowing the outcome of a dramatic scenario would affect a viewer’s ability to be drawn in by it. We showed our participants this short episode, in which a young boy finds a loaded gun and mistakes it for a toy. The boy grabs it and walks around his small town pointing it and shooting at people yelling “Bang! You’re dead!” oblivious to the fact that there is a bullet in the chamber.

Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/08/opinion/spoilers-succession-science.html