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And blow the birds about the sky
Mar. 4th, 2012 12:10 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 0. High today: 7, at 2 a.m., as the wind started howling out of the southwest. Strongest wind gust reported at Pearson was 98 km/h. It's really something to think that that's still 20 km/h off the minimum sustained wind speed for a tropical cyclone to qualify as a hurricane. Chances are there weren't even any 98 km/h gusts hitting our house, but as it was creaking and cracking away through the night, losing chunks of the roof seemed like a real possibility.
Coincidentally or otherwise, half a dozen blackbirds, not baked in a pie, showed up at my feeders today. Turns out that they like sunflower seeds--
--which I found surprising. Rather than pecking at them like the blue jays and chickadees do, they chew them and spit out the shells.
I woke up this morning to Terry O'Reilly talking about movie trailers on Under the Influence, and specifically about the trailer for Castaway, which gave away the whole plot of the movie. He mentioned a study that found that people report enjoying stories with surprise endings more if they were told beforehand what the surprise is, and so naturally I spent, I don't know, half an hour tracking the thing (Jonathan D. Leavitt and Nicholas J.S. Christenfeld, "Story Spoilers Don't Spoil Stories", Psychological Science 23, no. 2) down. One kind of funny thing about it is that, as usual, its participants were undergrad psychology students, which means that they were largely female--which is funny because the lead author's faculty profile notes that one of his research interests is the relation between hormones and gendered behaviour. Anyway, apart from that, the most interesting thing to me at first glance in the study is that knowing the surprise beforehand most improved the participants' enjoyment of mysteries--the study also had them read "ironic twist stories" and "evocative stories", whatever those are. But at second glance, on blowing up ( the graph ) of the results so that I can actually see it, the most striking thing is that of the four "ironic-twist" stories they had the participants read, the spoiler improved enjoyment of one by a lot, and reduced enjoyment of another, which makes me wonder about sample-size problems. The authors hypothesize that spoilers increase enjoyment by actually increasing tension, e.g.: "knowing the ending of Oedipus Rex may heighten the pleasurable tension caused by the disparity in knowledge between the omniscient reader and the character marching to his doom." Well, maybe. Personally, my hypothesis would be that people like knowing things, don't like being confused, don't like not knowing what the point is of reading something, and generally like being in a position superior to the position they're assumed to be in--the story assumes you don't know, but you do. But the interesting question is, why, then, do people want to avoid spoilers, and why do people lose motivation to watch movies and TV shows (and I have to wonder: is it different with visual narratives than with written ones, contra O'Reilly's assumption?) if the ending has been spoiled for them? The article's concluding paragraph begins (before the cute ending: "Perhaps birthday presents are better when wrapped in cellophane, and engagement rings when not concealed in chocolate mousse"): "Erroneous intuitions about the nature of spoilers may persist because individual readers are unable to compare spoiled and unspoiled experiences of a novel story." So, they suppose that people think they'll enjoy something less if they know how it ends, but actually they won't, and the problem is that they had no way of knowing that until this study came out. Of course, that doesn't say anything about why people think they'll enjoy it less in the first place, and, maybe more importantly, it says nothing about whether what people are looking for in their experience of a narrative is enjoyment, or at least enjoyment of the kind that can be improved by having the ending of a story spoiled.
If you want to know something about how spoilers work, I think you really ought to look at sports. Hardly anyone wants to watch a sporting contest of which they know the outcome. A lot of people don't even want to watch a sporting contest unless it's live. (Which creates an interesting sorites problem: I have a serious problem with watching a baseball game after it's over, but hardly any problem with watching it on the 5-second (or whatever) delay you typically have on cable.) But suppose you're going to be made to watch a baseball game that has already happened, which you would otherwise not take it upon yourself to watch (which is the kind of thing that's happening in the study, and not the kind of thing that was happening in the case of people who might've wanted to go see Castaway). Will you enjoy it more if you're told how it's going to end, or if you're not?
What I actually liked more in that issue of Psychological Science was an article titled "Saving the Last for Best", which is about a study that found that if you give people five different-flavoured Hershey's Kisses, one at a time, and tell half the people for Kisses two through five "here is your next chocolate" and the other half of the people, for Kiss #5, "here is your last chocolate", not only will the latter half report having enjoyed the last chocolate more than any other chocolate, whereas the former half will report having liked it (though by a margin that looks probably statistically insignificant) least; they will actually report having enjoyed all the chocolates more than the former half did. (But I knew it was going to be the last thing I read in that issue of Psychological Science, so naturally I liked it more.)
And now, ( exclusive raw footage of the monster that sleeps on our bed: )
Coincidentally or otherwise, half a dozen blackbirds, not baked in a pie, showed up at my feeders today. Turns out that they like sunflower seeds--
--which I found surprising. Rather than pecking at them like the blue jays and chickadees do, they chew them and spit out the shells.
I woke up this morning to Terry O'Reilly talking about movie trailers on Under the Influence, and specifically about the trailer for Castaway, which gave away the whole plot of the movie. He mentioned a study that found that people report enjoying stories with surprise endings more if they were told beforehand what the surprise is, and so naturally I spent, I don't know, half an hour tracking the thing (Jonathan D. Leavitt and Nicholas J.S. Christenfeld, "Story Spoilers Don't Spoil Stories", Psychological Science 23, no. 2) down. One kind of funny thing about it is that, as usual, its participants were undergrad psychology students, which means that they were largely female--which is funny because the lead author's faculty profile notes that one of his research interests is the relation between hormones and gendered behaviour. Anyway, apart from that, the most interesting thing to me at first glance in the study is that knowing the surprise beforehand most improved the participants' enjoyment of mysteries--the study also had them read "ironic twist stories" and "evocative stories", whatever those are. But at second glance, on blowing up ( the graph ) of the results so that I can actually see it, the most striking thing is that of the four "ironic-twist" stories they had the participants read, the spoiler improved enjoyment of one by a lot, and reduced enjoyment of another, which makes me wonder about sample-size problems. The authors hypothesize that spoilers increase enjoyment by actually increasing tension, e.g.: "knowing the ending of Oedipus Rex may heighten the pleasurable tension caused by the disparity in knowledge between the omniscient reader and the character marching to his doom." Well, maybe. Personally, my hypothesis would be that people like knowing things, don't like being confused, don't like not knowing what the point is of reading something, and generally like being in a position superior to the position they're assumed to be in--the story assumes you don't know, but you do. But the interesting question is, why, then, do people want to avoid spoilers, and why do people lose motivation to watch movies and TV shows (and I have to wonder: is it different with visual narratives than with written ones, contra O'Reilly's assumption?) if the ending has been spoiled for them? The article's concluding paragraph begins (before the cute ending: "Perhaps birthday presents are better when wrapped in cellophane, and engagement rings when not concealed in chocolate mousse"): "Erroneous intuitions about the nature of spoilers may persist because individual readers are unable to compare spoiled and unspoiled experiences of a novel story." So, they suppose that people think they'll enjoy something less if they know how it ends, but actually they won't, and the problem is that they had no way of knowing that until this study came out. Of course, that doesn't say anything about why people think they'll enjoy it less in the first place, and, maybe more importantly, it says nothing about whether what people are looking for in their experience of a narrative is enjoyment, or at least enjoyment of the kind that can be improved by having the ending of a story spoiled.
If you want to know something about how spoilers work, I think you really ought to look at sports. Hardly anyone wants to watch a sporting contest of which they know the outcome. A lot of people don't even want to watch a sporting contest unless it's live. (Which creates an interesting sorites problem: I have a serious problem with watching a baseball game after it's over, but hardly any problem with watching it on the 5-second (or whatever) delay you typically have on cable.) But suppose you're going to be made to watch a baseball game that has already happened, which you would otherwise not take it upon yourself to watch (which is the kind of thing that's happening in the study, and not the kind of thing that was happening in the case of people who might've wanted to go see Castaway). Will you enjoy it more if you're told how it's going to end, or if you're not?
What I actually liked more in that issue of Psychological Science was an article titled "Saving the Last for Best", which is about a study that found that if you give people five different-flavoured Hershey's Kisses, one at a time, and tell half the people for Kisses two through five "here is your next chocolate" and the other half of the people, for Kiss #5, "here is your last chocolate", not only will the latter half report having enjoyed the last chocolate more than any other chocolate, whereas the former half will report having liked it (though by a margin that looks probably statistically insignificant) least; they will actually report having enjoyed all the chocolates more than the former half did. (But I knew it was going to be the last thing I read in that issue of Psychological Science, so naturally I liked it more.)
And now, ( exclusive raw footage of the monster that sleeps on our bed: )
