Superb. The whole thing with spoilers. I wonder if this isn't the case of curiosity (drive / impulse) clashing with another of the weird-but-universal human pursuits, i.e. our love, nay, a veritable obsession with NARRATIVES (both real/true and fictional). If we have a love for stories -- and we most certainly do, and with a good adaptive reason -- episodic memory / narratives is how we both store the knowledge of how the world works and how our brains get trained in organising this knowledge and applying contingent "truths", cf. the idea of decoupling alternative/ contingent representations from each other -- then it probably includes an aesthetic preference for a complete narrative arc, where resolution is only satisfying if it, well, resolves the plot points.
So I propose that curiosity drives the interest in the result, but the story-love drives the hatred of spoilers.
Thanks for the comment and kind words! There’s a literature that your comment reminds me of-and I probably should have referred to-called Darwinian Literature. Lisa Zunshine (not a typo) has a book called The Secret Life of Literature and Joseph Carroll has a book—back in 2004—called Literary Darwinism. Both get at this a bit. See also work by Brian Boyd, Denis Dutton, and Jonathna Gottschall. But, yes, there could be a taste for experiencing the narrative arc in some sort of coherent way? I wonder how that preference intersects with movies such as Memento. Hm.
Thanks for the pointers, going to have a look. If I was to speculate before checking those out, the classic / popular narrative arc might map a physiological arousal/release curve of some kind. I'm not suggesting all storytelling is porn underneath by any means, but I think the dynamics of various pleasure-pursuing behaviours, not just sexual, are similar, with a buildup at some sloping angle, peak/climax closely followed by resolution/sharp drop in arousal. "Perversions" of that would be more a premise of artsy (contrarian, signalling sophistication, prioritising weird novelty, ????) works.
Superb. The whole thing with spoilers. I wonder if this isn't the case of curiosity (drive / impulse) clashing with another of the weird-but-universal human pursuits, i.e. our love, nay, a veritable obsession with NARRATIVES (both real/true and fictional). If we have a love for stories -- and we most certainly do, and with a good adaptive reason -- episodic memory / narratives is how we both store the knowledge of how the world works and how our brains get trained in organising this knowledge and applying contingent "truths", cf. the idea of decoupling alternative/ contingent representations from each other -- then it probably includes an aesthetic preference for a complete narrative arc, where resolution is only satisfying if it, well, resolves the plot points.
So I propose that curiosity drives the interest in the result, but the story-love drives the hatred of spoilers.
Thanks for the comment and kind words! There’s a literature that your comment reminds me of-and I probably should have referred to-called Darwinian Literature. Lisa Zunshine (not a typo) has a book called The Secret Life of Literature and Joseph Carroll has a book—back in 2004—called Literary Darwinism. Both get at this a bit. See also work by Brian Boyd, Denis Dutton, and Jonathna Gottschall. But, yes, there could be a taste for experiencing the narrative arc in some sort of coherent way? I wonder how that preference intersects with movies such as Memento. Hm.
Thanks for the pointers, going to have a look. If I was to speculate before checking those out, the classic / popular narrative arc might map a physiological arousal/release curve of some kind. I'm not suggesting all storytelling is porn underneath by any means, but I think the dynamics of various pleasure-pursuing behaviours, not just sexual, are similar, with a buildup at some sloping angle, peak/climax closely followed by resolution/sharp drop in arousal. "Perversions" of that would be more a premise of artsy (contrarian, signalling sophistication, prioritising weird novelty, ????) works.