From Comic Book Movie –Study Reveals That Spoilers Do NOT Ruin The Experience And Actually Make Us Happy!:
“Geek Tyrant point out the following study conducted at UC San Diego by psychology researchers Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt. The aim of it was to find out the effects of spoilers on people, and whether or not they do in fact end up ruining the enjoyment of a story, which in this case was in the form of a series of novels. Testing thirty people with three different stories, here are the results of the experiment.
Christenfeld and Leavitt ran three experiments with a total of 12 short stories. Three types of stories were studied: ironic-twist, mystery and literary. Each story ? classics by the likes of John Updike, Roald Dahl, Anton Chekhov, Agatha Christie and Raymond Carver ? was presented as-is (without a spoiler), with a prefatory spoiler paragraph or with that same paragraph incorporated into the story as though it were a part of it. Each version of each”
