Meet the Professor Who Looks Up ‘Top Chef’ Spoilers — and Studies Them

America is divided. There’s a clear rift between people who live in rural and urban areas, Democrats and Republicans, and those who look up spoilers and those who wait patiently to find out what happened.

Bill Levine, an associate professor of psychological science at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, is a fan but also a scholar of spoilers. In fact, he seeks out spoilers before watching episodes of the reality-TV show Top Chef.

He’s also researching whether spoilers have a positive or negative effect on the experience of media consumption. Inspired by research in 2011 that concluded that spoilers actually increased enjoyment for a group of people reading short stories, Mr. Levine and a student, Michelle Betzner, tackled spoilers’ effect on reader enjoyment. Though Mr. Levine’s research uses short stories to test theories, he says the effect of spoilers can be applied to television shows, movies, and novels.

Spoiler alert: It’s not the easiest research to conduct, and Mr. Levine and his students have even run into some reproducibility issues.

Mr. Levine spoke with The Chronicle last week about researching spoilers and why it’s a tough topic to study. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. How did you start studying spoilers?

A. There was a paper that was released in 2011 that reported people who were reading short stories enjoyed them more when they had been given a spoiler for the ending than when they hadn’t. It made a big splash, not only within psychology research but also in the media. It was all over the internet.

My lab reading group, the graduate student in my lab [Kevin Autry], and the undergraduate students, we read the paper. And one of my graduate students in the lab complained about it. He said that, “OK, maybe people who are recruited into an experiment and have no investment at all in reading the short stories don’t care that much.” Does that tell us anything about what happens when people actually are invested in things that they are reading or watching?

Usually when people are thinking of spoilers they’re thinking about watching the next episode of Games of Thrones because they’ve been watching an entire season or several seasons’ worth, and they’re amped up for the next episode. It was his complaint about the finding’s being not generalizable to what we really care about that got us started on this.

Q. Did the graduate student who had a problem with the original paper bring up the reproducibility crisis?

A. It was only kind of after we got the results of Michelle Betzner’s — the second author of the paper — honors thesis that it started to occur to me that this finding might be hard to replicate.

It didn’t have the feel of some of the things in psychology that have been hard to replicate. If you talk to people, you might know some of the hallmarks of some of the hard-to-replicate findings are very small samples. The original paper that was published in 2011, they actually had about 800 people participate in that research. It was an enormous sample.

I’ve now had a second honors student once again fail to replicate the original finding, and find that spoilers really make things at least a little bit worse, not better. It’s become more a focus of my thoughts, having done this with two honors students now.

Q. What surprised you the most about your findings?

A. The original complaint that my graduate student had was about this not being stories that people cared about. What we tried to do was “middle-story spoilers.” We had people reading stories, and at a critical moment in the story, before the twist ending was revealed, we then spoiled the story because we thought that would be a simulation of what it would be like to watch an entire TV series except for the finale, and learn just before the finale what was going to happen.

Those type of spoilers didn’t really move enjoyment one way or the other. It really wasn’t that surprising, based on my intuition of what people say, that spoilers make things worse. It was surprising that given the published results, we didn’t find any evidence at all now in a couple of experiments that spoilers aren’t making things better, as much as we can tell. We’re talking about averages across a few hundred people who are doing these experiments.

Q. Why did you guys want to simulate watching a television series and then getting spoiled before the final episode?

A. Pure intuition. When you’re reading either on Twitter or anywhere else on the internet, they say something like “spoiler alert.” It’s almost always about some ongoing TV series that lots of people are talking about. It’s really rarely at the beginning of a TV series that people are worried about spoilers.

Although I think that’s happening even more now. When Netflix drops a series, and the entire thing is available in one day, some people are watching and the first-day spoiler alerts are thrown around all over the place. It was really our intuition. There wasn’t really a theoretical framework that we had that we’re trying to figure out. It’s a guess at this point.

Q. Could this research apply to movies or novels? Maybe a novel with a twist at the end like the book Gone Girl or Fates and Furies.

A. I think it does. It would be hard research to do in a laboratory. Getting somebody to read a novel in a laboratory is probably next to impossible. I’m working with an honors student on developing a project for next year, and we’re thinking of trying to figure out what TV series is popular for this coming fall, and she’s doing her thesis and finding out who’s watching these TV shows and possibly spoiling things for them. I think this research does apply to different types of media, different media, different genres.

Q. Do you look up spoilers for TV shows, books, and short stories that you read?

A. Rarely stories, but actually TV shows. I watch sports, and I actually watch some reality TV, which are competition shows like Top Chef. For sports, if I ever record something on a DVR, I avoid very carefully how it’s going to turn out. For Top Chef, I don’t mind reading who’s going to win ahead of time. I’ve never really thought of why that’s the case for myself, maybe because for sports the process that leads to the outcome is what’s interesting. I’m never going to be able to taste the food, I can’t really judge what’s going on. The process that leads to the outcome isn’t all that interesting for me — it’s who won, ultimately, that winds up being interesting. Yes, for TV shows and especially for competition-based reality, I’m happy to read the outcome. Also, for The Amazing Race, for that matter.

Q. Well, I look up every season of The Bachelor, if that makes you feel any better.

A. It does actually. As a methodological point of view, there’s never a way to do these studies within an individual. We can’t have the same person watch something without a spoiler and then with a spoiler and ask them, “Which way would you prefer?” I wish we could do that and erase somebody’s memory for what they watched and have them do it again under different circumstances.

Q. Do you ever look up spoilers for narrative-drive TV shows, like Games of Thrones or The Americans?

A. I don’t tend to. It’s not because I’m avoiding it. It’s actually because my wife doesn’t want me to. She’s bothered when I do it for Top Chef, but it’s mostly the way we interact. I won’t do it for the narrative TV shows, and it’s mostly out of respect for her not wanting me to.

For example, I watched Mr. Robot after it was out. I read a ton about it before watching it, so I kind of knew a lot of what was going to be happening. For that show, which is kind of complicated in terms of plot and timeline, and who the characters actually are, I found it helpful to know ahead of time what people were thinking, what had happened. For complicated narratives, this is where I think spoilers may be beneficial to some extent. Again, this is not something that we’ve been able to test in the laboratory, but if we could, it would be very interesting to do.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz is a web writer. Follow her on Twitter @FernandaZamudio, or email her at fzamudiosuarez@chronicle.com.