Confident folks enjoy a surprise in mystery endings, study says

[Sojiita]

Predictable stories found to satisfy those with low self-esteem
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Matt Zapotosky
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH


Feeling down after a bad day at work?

A murder mystery might cheer you up, depending on your personality, new research indicates.

For some, it turns out, surprise endings can make things worse.

Ohio State University communication professor Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick studied 84 German college students and found that those with low selfesteem preferred mysteries with predictable endings.

Figuring out the mystery "gives them a little bit of a boost of self-esteem," Knobloch-Westerwick said.

Those with confidence, on the other hand, liked stories with surprise endings.

"People with high self-esteem don’t need that boost."

The German students were given questionnaires to determine levels of confidence. They also were given one of three murder-mystery stories — one that confirmed the readers’ suspicions, one that pointed to an innocent suspect and one that gave no clues about the ending.

Those with high self-esteem reported enjoying the story that misdirected them to an innocent suspect, while those with low self-esteem liked the story that confirmed their suspicions.

Everyone seemed to enjoy the story with no hints about the killer.

Knobloch-Westerwick’s research, co-written by Caterina Keplinger of Hanover University in Germany, was recently published in the journal Media Psychology.

Knobloch-Westerwick, who examines how people respond to different types of entertainment, said she decided to conduct the study when she found that there was little research on murder mysteries.

"Crime novels and mysteries is one genre that nobody’s really studied," she said. "There are encyclopedias about this whole genre, but nobody studies responses to this genre."

Author Judy Clemens said she is not going to change the way she writes.

"Who wants to write a mystery that you can figure out right away?" said Clemens, an Ottawa, Ohio, resident who is working on her fourth mystery novel.

"The typical mystery reader is very intelligent, wants a complex plot, wants complex characters. … A mystery that’s too easy is kind of insulting in a lot of ways."

Josh Duke, a librarian at the Main Library Downtown, said his recommendations for books are based on characters and plot development, not endings.

"If you try to put a name to it, you try to overanalyze it or overthink it, that sort of ruins the process," he said.

Charles Emery, a psychology professor at Ohio State, said he can understand how low selfesteem plays into picking out the right book.

"They don’t think they’ve got the capacity to deal with it, so for them it’s going to be more pleasurable for them to experience the more predictable ending," he said. Knobloch said that although she prefers surprise endings, there was no mystery to her study results. "They were just picture-perfect," she said. http://dispatch.com/news-story.php?s...217-C5-01.html

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Interesting..so what do YOU prefer? (be honest now.. )

[twitchy]

I like not knowing who dunnit but it must be well crafted and not one of those pieces of tripe. I occasionally like a predictable ending in a mystery but only when a truly despicable character gets a gruesome comeuppance. I can cheer that!

When the Sherlock Holmes stories came out, they spawned imitators one of which I read a while ago. It was awful! I could have strangled the author if he wasn't already dead. At the very end a new character was introduced and hauled away by the police. No evidence except the smug pronouncements of the "brilliant detective". I didn't see that one coming!