JK Rowling and her multibillion dollar book series strike again.
This time, Rowling's Harry Potter novels have been linked with decreasing prejudice in stigmatized groups among students, according to a study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.
Researchers led by Loris Venzalli, from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, have found that students who read and identify with the protagonist, Harry Potter, and disidentify with the antagonist, Voldemort, had higher levels of attitude improvement towards stigmatized outgroups such as immigrants, homosexuals and refugees. However, Venzalli said in the results the study only applied to people who identified with the main character or disidentified with the villian.
In the first study, researchers took data from Italian, fifth-grade elementary school students. They were asked to answer a questionnaire about their attitudes towards immigrants.
Then the students were divided into smaller groups that met with a researcher once a week for the next six weeks. They read a variety of passages in one of two conditions, prejudice and control. Passages were divided into conditions by unrelated judges.
In the experimental condition, students read passages about prejudice in the book while in the control condition, students read passages that did not mention prejudice. Afterwards, the children were administered another questionnaire that assessed attitudes towards immigrants.
Researchers found that children who had read the passages related to prejudice had improved attitudes towards immigrants even after taking into consideration the number of Harry Potter books students had read and the number of Harry Potter movies they had seen.
In the second study, researchers replicated the procedure with high school students rather than elementary school students and attitudes towards homosexuals rather than attitudes towards immigrants. Again, researchers found that reading the Harry Potter novels improved attitudes towards the stigmatized group, in students who identified with Harry.
Finally, researchers looked at a population of undergraduate students and assessed attitudes towards refugees. Students were asked to answer two questionnaires in random order. One questionnaire asked about attitudes towards refugees while the other assessed factors such as the amount of television watched, Harry Potter books read and Harry Potter movies viewed.
Again, they found that reading Harry Potter improved attitudes towards refugees. However, in this case, it was contingent upon the degree to which participants disidentified with the villain character Voldemort.
"The fact that, in contrast with previous studies, identification with Harry Potter did not moderate the results may depend on the perception of Harry as a less relevant model or the age group included in the study," the report reads.
Children, even in the youngest groups, were able to make parallels between the characters in the books and outgroups they experienced in their communities. This research follows similar studies that show that reading fiction can reduce racism if the books contain diverse characters.
