My first introduction to the term was an article in the old National Lampoon called “Spoilers,” and which was a listing of the twists of many famous movies and books. I had seen only a fraction of them, but remembered the article. Later, as I started seeing the things involved, I found I enjoyed them just as much as if I had known the twist. I’ve also had films like The Crying Game spoiled for me, but still enjoyed the film.
The results are actually in line with how Hollywood views film advertising: they often give away plot twists in trailers because, from experience, they find most people will go to see how the twist was set up (and also because you don’t realize they’re giving anything away until you see the movie).
Personally, I think the “the film was ruined for me because you told me the ending” is just a form of posing. If the people watch a good film even knowing the twist, it will still work. I’ve had too many times where I enjoyed something whose ending I knew (or guessed early on).
Sometimes knowing the twist changes the movie, admittedly, but not always for the worse. I guessed the twist of Sixth Sense a quarter of the way into the movie, and it became a game of spot the clues, which was really fun.
I don’t avoid them, nor do I seek them out. I will deliberately ignore threads with Spoilers, but if a thread has spoilers embedded, I tend to break and just look at them. I’m also a shameless TV Tropes whore, and during downtime from a game or something occasionally I’ll look at the page and get a few things spoiled for me. Amusingly, a lot of times they’re so non-specific I get a skewed perception of what the twist really is (i.e. I hear there’s a new playable character near the end, and the old main character dies. So I assume your character gets killed off and you shift perspective, when in fact you shift perspective and your character doesn’t die until the very, very end), and become even more surprised than if I had been allowed to guess it myself, or went in without any information.
I suspect I’d have been happier seeing Robot Chicken’s spoiler version of Every M. Night Shaylalalamana Movie Evah than actually watching even one of them through without knowing the ending.
I generally prefer to avoid spoilers. The major exception being plot points that are likely to make me hate the story and regret reading it; everybody dies & it was all futile in the end, it was all a dream, she marries her abuser, etc.
Undergraduates. Usually, when you hear about a study with absurd results, and think to yourself, “What morons did they test?!” - the answer is “undergraduates”.
Note that the students were given literature to read; they did not pick out something to read for pleasure. In other words, the study says that when you give someone something to read which they would probably not read if not prompted, then they don’t really care if they know how it ends ahead of time. Indeed, for the English 101-type selections they chose, it could be a boon to have an idea of what the plot is about. That would allow you to focus on the writing.
A suggestion to the “researchers” who performed this “study”: Go to a local movie theater. Walk to the front of each line of people who are minutes away from entering to see a film. Tell them how it ends. Record the results.
I also suspect the sample size should have been larger. As this thread demonstrates, people vary widely in their attitudes toward spoilers.
I am firmly in the “don’t reveal the spoilers” camp. While there may be things to be gained by watching the movie or reading the story when you know how it will end, you can have it both ways: just watch/read it once without the spoiler, then watch/read it again.
My exception to this rule is the kind of story where the writer puts you into an unfamiliar, confusing situation and doesn’t reveal until the end, or at least well into the story, WTF is going on. In that case, I might prefer to know ahead of time what the ending was—but I don’t really like that kind of story anyway.
Note that if the author had wanted you to know the ending or twist early on, he/she was perfectly capable of revealing it to you him/herself, by inserting a spoiler paragraph in his/her own story.