Rosebud is a sled, bitches!

Call off your dogs, spoiler police. A new study from the University of California at San Diego suggests that knowing the outcome of a story doesn't ruin it -- in fact, it increases its pleasures. Rosebud is a sled, bitches!

For their study, Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt provided participants with a variety of "ironic-twist, mystery and literary" short stories from authors including John Updike, Roald Dahl, Anton Chekhov, Agatha Christie and Raymond Carver. Some readers read the stories in their original forms. Some were given a preface with the spoiler. Others had a spoiler rewritten into the middle of the story. Now here's the SHOCKING TWIST: Nearly every time, the readers preferred the "spoiled" versions. And the more of a gotcha the story contained -- like Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" -- the more readers enjoyed knowing the outcome ahead of time. By the way, he's dead. You're welcome.

rest of the article via salon