© 2024 Texas Public Radio
Real. Reliable. Texas Public Radio.
Donate
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Spoiler Alert! The Psychology Of Surprise Endings

By Shankar Vedantam,
Tara Boyle, Laura Kwerel
Published December 3, 2018 at 4:01 PM CST
Angela Hsieh
/
NPR

Writers and filmmakers hoping to hoodwink their fans with plot twists have long known what cognitive scientists know: All of us have blind spots in the way we assess the world. We get distracted. We forget how we know things. We see patterns that aren't there. Because these blind spots are wired into the brain, they act in ways that are predictable — so predictable that storytellers from Sophocles to M. Night Shyamalan have used them to lead us astray.

In recent years, some scientists have begun to ask, can stories serve as a kind of brain scan? If a plot twist works by exploiting our biases and mental shortcuts, can observing the mechanics of a good story reveal something important about the contours of the mind?"

"Stories are a kind of magic trick," says cognitive scientist Vera Tobin. "When we dissect them, we can discover very, very reliable aspects of those tricks that turn out to be important clues about the way that people think."

A few of the storyteller's favorite biases:

  • The Curse of Knowledge:The mother of all blind spots, this is the tendency to assume that others know what you know.

  • Confirmation Bias:The tendency to seek information that confirms what you already believe.

  • Anchoring: The tendency to lean too heavily on the first piece of information you hear, failing to correct it as you learn new data.

  • Availability Bias: The tendency to believe that things that spring readily to mind are more plausible than things that spring less readily to mind.

  • Hindsight Bias: The tendency to see an event as predictable, once it has already unfolded. We experience hindsight bias when we look back and say, "I knew it all along."

    • More Reading:

    "Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot," by Vera Tobin

    "Cognitive bias and the poetics of surprise," by Vera Tobin in Language and Literature

    "The Curse of Knowledge in Reasoning About False Beliefs," by Susan A.J. Birch and Paul Bloom in Psychological Science

    "Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research," by Stephen L. Macknik, Mac King, James Randi, Apollo Robbins, Teller, John Thompson, and Susana Martinez-Conde in Nature Reviews Neuroscience

    Hidden Brain is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Jennifer Schmidt, Rhaina Cohen, Parth Shah, Thomas Lu, Laura Kwerel, and Camila Vargas Restrepo. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. You can also follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain.

    Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

    Shankar Vedantam
    Shankar Vedantam is the host and creator of Hidden Brain. The Hidden Brain podcast receives more than three million downloads per week. The Hidden Brain radio show is distributed by NPR and featured on nearly 400 public radio stations around the United States.
    See stories by Shankar Vedantam
    Tara Boyle
    Tara Boyle is the supervising producer of NPR's Hidden Brain. In this role, Boyle oversees the production of both the Hidden Brain radio show and podcast, providing editorial guidance and support to host Shankar Vedantam and the shows' producers. Boyle also coordinates Shankar's Hidden Brain segments on Morning Edition and other NPR shows, and oversees collaborations with partners both internal and external to NPR. Previously, Boyle spent a decade at WAMU, the NPR station in Washington, D.C. She has reported for The Boston Globe, and began her career in public radio at WBUR in Boston.
    See stories by Tara Boyle
    Laura Kwerel
    [Copyright 2024 NPR]