Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
The spoiled works were only slightly better liked.
The studies, as I read them, are about the gap between what people think they like and what they do like. They say nothing about what people buy.
Your points about student culture are good ones. It may be that restricting to people who read lots of books would give a different result.
I have another hypothesis about which people would, and would not, actually like spoiled stories and books. People with a stronger motive to achievement would tend to like spoilers, except in the case of relatively easy to solve mysteries. That's because we achievement types (I am one) dislike playing games unless we probably will lose. But readers with a greater need for power would be glad to get into a battle for wits with a brilliant mystery writer for the same unfathomable (to me) reason many, not all, of those folks buy lottery tickets. For some, a near-hopeless challenge is apparently great fun. |
Given that, per Henry Murray's definition, people with a Need for Achievement exert "intense, prolonged and repeated efforts
to accomplish something difficult. To work with singleness of purpose towards a high and distant goal. To have the determination to win," (
italic emphasis added) I am pretty sure that I don't understand how you can correlate the utter lack of effort involved in using spoilers to this personality type. ??? How does using spoilers, to avoid having to figure out the plotline/mystery/storyline along the way, or wait for the reveal, ending, whatever, correspond to working with "singleness of purpose...to a goal?" The goal, then, if I understand you, is simply finishing the book, or knowing the storyline/content
without reading it? I'm not being argumentative here; I'm genuinely trying to understand it. If the "goal" is simply knowing the content, why bother to read it in the first place? Why not just use Cliff's Notes? Where's the
accomplishment that seems to be the core of this so-called "need?"
Insofar as the theory that about PowN's (need for power), mmmm...don't see that at all. Seems utterly contraindicated, if you think it through.
Quote:
Then there are the people who need no spoilers because they always can figure out who did it. I don't even want to think about those people 
|
Most of the more-avid readers of mysteries I know can nearly always figure out "whodunit" far in advance of the big reveal. With most writers today, it's just not that hard. Certainly in TV and Movies, a "whodunit" that is genuinely baffling is of unicorn-like rarity; the same is true of most books published today, which are aimed at the reading comprehension levels of 11 year-olds. It should not be considered "eek-worthy."
Just my $.02.
Hitch