twooffour said:
It's questions the study should've been asking if it wanted truly significant results.
That is too funny. The study didn't study what you wanted it to study, so the results are not "truly significant."
12 selected stories with no examination of their specific content? Sorry.
No need to apologize! The point is that 11/12 stories were rated more highly after knowing the twist. That is pretty significant. Are you saying at least 11 of the stories had twists of low quality? Or that at least 11 of the stories were of a markedly different character than stories in general? There were a variety of stories by different authors.
I think the cleverness of a twist might only be determinant when that's all the story has going for it, like the punchline of a joke.
Well what do you base this sweeping statement on again?
If you noticed how I started my sentence ("I think"), it is clearly a supposition.
How about the story has to offer a lot, but the twist adds even more to the enjoyment?
LOST had to offer a lot, and I'd like some study on that showing that people who already knew the flashsides were a con and a duck, enjoyed it just as much.
What if the story is so engaging, it allows you to suck in the twist with loving passion without scrutinizing its crude underpinnings? The quality of the twist would matter in a lesser story, but less so here.
Sometimes research rebuts our personal feelings. As I said, I prefer to not know the twists. But maybe, just maybe, I would rate a story more enjoyable knowing the twist ahead of time, nonetheless. Even recognizing this, I still maintain I wouldn't want to know the twists. I greatly enjoy Lost. If I had known that the flashsides were a ruse, I can't say that I would have rated it less highly. I think you're trying too hard to supplant research with personal feelings and anecdotes. There well may be an error in the research, but you haven't identified it.
Then, of course, the are two components of the enjoyment, aren't there - before the twist, and after (or during). The surprise during the twist is what usually sticks in the memory the most.
So you'd have to ask the participants how they were feeling before the surprise, and how impressed they were with the WTF moment in the aftermath.
So you want to ask if the twist in isolation was more enjoyable knowing or not knowing - not whether the work as a whole was enjoyable. And this is the problem with your whole, "argument." I would think it obvious that a twist is more enjoyable not knowing it. But that wasn't the question. The question was whether the story as a whole is less enjoyable for knowing the twist. It is a significant question, even if it's not the more myopic question you would ask.