Reading 'Harry Potter' Makes You A Better Person, Research Shows
New research from an Italian university suggests that J.K. Rowling's wizardly world helps kids to be more empathic. It's all in the study's title: "The greatest magic of Harry Potter: Reducing prejudice."
There are two bodies of research intersecting here.
Research is starting to show that reading literary fiction can train you in social perception and understanding other peoples' experience of the world.
Other research shows that you can get people to be less prejudiced if they interact with people who they don't identify with - psychologists call it "inter-group contact."
This can happen by way of written word, reports Bret Stetka at Scientific American, since kids have better attitudes toward "stigmatized groups" if they read stories about friendship between characters from different sides of the tracks.
Beyond the dragons and wands, "Harry Potter" has lots of those group dynamics: there's the "muggles," derided for their magiclessness; the "mudbloods," scoffed at for being half-breeds (such as our hero Harry); and the curious case of Lord Voldemort, "who believes that power should only be held by 'pure-blood' wizards," Stetka says. "He's Hitler in a cloak."
It's in these group dynamics that the hidden magic of Potter lies.
In the study, lead author Loris Vezzali of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy gave 34 elementary school children a questionnaire regarding their feelings about immigrants. Their attitudes toward them changed, by way of Harry Potter.
Stetka sketches the experiment:
After being exposed to Malfoy's unsavory intolerance, the students showed more tolerance.
Follow-up experiments showed similar tolerance-inducing results. In one experiment, Italian high schoolers had better attitudes toward gay people after spending some time with Harry and the gang, while another found that British college students felt more compassionate toward refugees after hanging out in Hogwarts.
The key might be the genre itself. Vezzali, the lead author of the study, says that fantasy is great for opening up people's minds because you get to sidestep political defensiveness since you're usually dealing with goblins and orcs rather than groups of people.