A confession: I am one of the maybe six people left who have never seen an episode of Game of Thrones. Just existing in the world and on the internet means I have, over the years, indirectly absorbed a rough working knowledge of the show, enough that I can sort of follow along with friends’ conversations about it.

我坦白：我就是大约六人里面那个连一集《权力的游戏》都没看过的人。我是说，只要活在世上而且上个网，过去这些年，我对这部剧的粗略了解也够我跟得上朋友们的对话了。

One study suggested that spoiled stories were actually more enjoyable possibly because they’re easier to process while a later investigation found the precise opposite.

有研究称，剧透的故事情节其实更令人愉悦，大概因为这样的故事更好理解吧，而后又有一项调查的结果与之截然相反。

But the answer may be slightly more nuanced than “spoilers good” or “spoilers bad” — maybe, as a new study in the journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture suggests, it depends on your personality.

“剧透“”到底“是好是坏”，答案或许还有些微妙，《大众媒体文化心理》期刊一项新的研究发现，这取决于你的个性。

The study authors, professors of communication at Albany State University, in Georgia, and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, focused on two personality elements: “need for cognition,” or how much a person likes to use their brain for challenging mental activities, and “need for affect,” or the tendency to seek out emotional situations.

研究的作者是通讯方向的教授，来自美国纽约州立大学奥尔巴尼分校和阿姆斯特丹自由大学，他们重点关注两大个性元素：“认知需求”，即一个人需要多大的脑力活动挑战，和“影响需求”，走出情感局面的倾向。

In the first part of the study, a group of 358 college students read “previews” of short stories, including some that contained spoilers, and then reported which previews made them most interested in reading the full stories. When the volunteers then took personality tests, the researchers found, the same people who had scored low on need for cognition were also the ones who said they’d rather read the stories that’d already been spoiled.

在第一部分的研究中，358名大学生读了小说的“预告”，包括部分剧透内容，然后报告他们对整篇故事里哪部分情节最有兴趣。然后，这些学生志愿者参加了性格测试，研究人员发现，“认知需求”分数低者同样也是称愿意读剧情透露故事的人群。

The study authors then gave their subjects copies of a handful of stories that had been included in the previews — some that they’d read spoilers for, and some where they still didn’t know what would happen. When the volunteers rate how much they’d liked the stories, another pattern emerged: The people who had scored higher on the need for affect enjoyed the unspoiled stories more.

研究人员继而给了实验参与者一批故事看，这些故事在预告中已经有所涉及，有些已经剧透，还有些故事的情节尚不知如何发展。后来这些实验参与者评价他们对故事的喜欢程度时，又一个模式出现了：影响需求分值高者更喜欢读未经剧透的故事。