The beloved Harry Potter book series: Too soon for spoilers? (Credit: Bizuayehu Tesfaye/AP Images)

I meant to cover this topic last month after Brian Moylan’s hilarious screed against spoiler alerts hit Gawker (Key line: “If you’re three-quarters of the way into a review of a show’s second season and you don’t expect details from season one to be discussed, you’re an idiot.”), but a pair of researchers from the University of California at San Diego may have gotten the last word on that. Spoiler alert: It turns out that people don’t really care about spoilers that much.

Researchers Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt wanted to find out once and for all if knowing how something ends ruined one’s enjoyment of it, so they ran three experiments involving a dozen classic short stories. Each story was presented in one of three ways: without spoilers (as written), with an opening paragraph explaining the ending or with the spoiler paragraph incorporated into the story as if it belonged there. They had at least 30 people read each version of each story and I’m pretty sure you can guess what happened next: The test subjects actually enjoyed the stories that explained their endings upfront more. Why? As it turns out, the stories are so good that the conclusions just don’t matter. According to Christenfeld, “Plots are just excuses for great writing … the plot is (almost) irrelevant. The pleasure is in the writing.” That may be true, but please, please don’t test that theory if you see me reading “A Clash of Kings” on the subway.

The study will appear in the next issue of Psychological Science magazine — but you already know how it ends, right?