Science, bless its heart, has finally gotten down to figuring out why spoilers are such a gut-churningly horrific scourge on society. (I’ve been e-mailing them for YEARS.) The reason, it seems, is that anticipation, suspension of disbelief, and the exploration of fictional worlds are all deeply intertwined with the way we experience pleasure. And when someone stomps all over those fictional worlds—PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT DOWNTON ABBEY ON TWITTER LIKE WANTON BLAB-HUSSIES—it hurts. Spoilers hurt. Everyone.*
Jennifer Richler at the Atlantic explored the relationship between pleasure, pain, and spoilers (she also experienced the exact same Downton Abbey heartbreak that I did—we should start a support group!), and her conclusions are super interesting:
So what’s with our obsession with make-believe? Bloom and others argue that, on some level, we don’t distinguish fact from fiction. There’s research to back this up: For example, a study found that people refuse to eat a piece of fudge shaped to look like feces, even though they know it’s just fudge. Appearance and reality get blurred. We like stories about sex because we like having sex, and somewhere in our minds, the two are the same. As Thalia Goldstein, a psychology professor at Pace University, explained to me, this blurring actually happens at the neurological level: The conscious, thinking parts of our brain tell us that a story isn’t real, but the more primitive parts tell us it is.
This research suggests one explanation for why spoilers suck: They remind us that a story is just a story. It’s hard to get transported when you already know where you’ll end up-in real life you don’t have that knowledge.
And, my favorite bit: