Comment Re:"Study" (Score 1) 238
1) This got published because it used a formal methodology that's accepted in psychology. Conditions were counterbalanced, statistics were properly done, and the effects show up in both by-subjects and by-item analyses. There's no quackery here at all. To address an issue that other people have raised, I agree that there are legitimate complaints to be made about the validity of self-assessed preference ratings, but scientists often have to use imperfect measurements to estimate underlying processes. For example, fMRI studies use blood flow in the brain to approximate neural activity.
2) Looking at the actual paper, the authors tested 819 different people. 30 is just the minimum number of people who read each of the 3 versions of each of the 12 stories that were used across the experiments. The articles linked to in the summary did not make this as clear as they could have.
3) Having seen the stimuli myself, the spoilers were exactly that: spoilers. They really did tell the readers who the killer was, etc.
For what it's worth, I don't think the authors would disagree with you that some people like spoilers and some people don't. Importantly, they're not trying to say anything about any particular person, and they'd probably be the first to agree that you know what you like better than they do. What their research shows, though, is that - at least for the kinds of people they tested and the kinds of materials they used - people tend to like stories more when they're spoiled.
(I agree with you about the trailers, by the way.)