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Expect the Unexpected: Psycho and the Types of Planting and Payoff

Storytellers commonly employ a narrative device, termed “planting and payoff,” to choreograph audience expectations. Formalist methods within the humanities help us understand the structure of the device, and empirical research in psychology helps us understand the pleasures that attend it. A single instance of planting and payoff, however, may lead to different aesthetic responses, depending on the perceiver’s ability to cope with incongruity between the plant and the payoff. The aesthetic pleasure one derives from the planting-and-payoff device is largely a factor of a narrative’s structural incongruity (too much incongruity leads to confusion; too little leads to boredom) and the perceiver’s capacity for coping (too much capacity leads to boredom; too little leads to confusion). Psycho illustrates each of the ways in which storytellers employ planting and payoff to generate aesthetic pleasure.