I’m a little late to mention this here, but we published our long-gestating paper about story spoilers! The article is titled “Spoilers Affect the Enjoyment of Television Episodes but Not Short Stories”, and it’s coming soon in Psychological Reports. You can find the paper here: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0033294118793971 , and as always, if you are unable to access the article (because of a paywall issue), just let me know, and I’m happy to send you a copy.

The article is pretty straightforward: we tried to replicate previous effects showing that spoilers HELP our enjoyment of short stories. We gave participants a short story with a twist at the end, and for some, we spoiled the ending before they read the story. We didn’t find a positive effect, and in fact, we didn’t find any effect in either direction despite collecting hundreds of participants’ responses! Our second experiment applied the same methodology to full-length television episodes of The Twilight Zone. There, it seems that the spoilers had a detrimental effect on the enjoyment of the media. This may seem like a “no duh” type of result, but it’s important because the results on such methods are really mixed at the moment!

We have a couple of follow-ups currently in the works at Westfield State University. Will keep you updated!