Neuroscience
Harry Potter fans strongly self-identify with the different Houses within Hogwarts, the story’s magical school. Now new research shows that a fan’s preferred House tells us something about their personality.
Laura Crysel and colleagues used an online Harry Potter community to get access to the more committed fans found there, and asked them to complete a personality test. Each fan reported their favoured House, and the results showed that significant average personality differences existed between the fans of the different Houses.
Griffendors were the most extraverted, Hufflepuffs more agreeable, Ravenclaws sought more need for cognition, meaning they are excited by intellectual challenge, and Slytherins reported more of the "Dark Triad" personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. As even casual fans of the series will attest, these personality traits are reasonable characterisations of the fictional members of each House.
The feature of the Harry Potter story that I found curious was the sorting hat, used to allocate new magic pupils to one of these four Houses according to their qualities, abilities and beliefs. And following the sorting, the pupils went on to live up to the predictions: those joining Slytherin, for instance, became venomous bullies, cheats or thieves. At face value, it seemed as if the author JK Rowling was endorsing essentialism: people are what they are, or will turn out a certain way in a deterministic fashion, fated to the dark side. But I wondered also whether there was a rather sly critique going on about self-fulfilling prophecies (see our recent work on expectations about poverty to see real-world parallels).
You can turn the same kind of questions from the books to the readers in this study. Were our reader Slytherins always going to top the league for these Dark Triad traits, or did they start mainly thinking that snakes were cool, then, through a process of group identification, increasingly identify with more behaviours and attitudes endorsed by their fictional school-mates, through hundreds of pages? This is something the study can’t answer for us, but due to its influence, longevity, and presentation of characters over time, the Potter series would be a good candidate for examining how fictional in-groups shape our attitudes.
_________________________________
Crysel, L., Cook, C., Schember, T., & Webster, G. (2015). Harry Potter and the measures of personality: Extraverted Gryffindors, agreeable Hufflepuffs, clever Ravenclaws, and manipulative Slytherins Personality and Individual Differences, 83, 174-179 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2015.04.016
Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.
- How Do People With Dark Triad Personality Traits Fare At Speed Dating?
People who score highly in the Dark Triad personality traits – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – are vain, selfish, callous and manipulative. They're not the kind of people you want to spend much time with. This raises the obvious...
- Why Was Darth Vader So Evil? Blame His Lack Of Parental Care, Say Psychologists
Image: wikipediaWhy was Darth Vader such a bad dude? According to a team of psychologists led by Peter Jonason, it's down to his lack of parental care: the fact he was separated from his mother at age 9, and his father's absence. The researchers...
- Creatures Of The Night - People Who Favour The Evening Score Higher On Dark Triad Personality Traits
There are countless examples in nature of biological adaptations going hand in hand with either a nocturnal or diurnal (day-time) lifestyle. For instance, cats have reflective lenses allowing better vision in low light; chimps have colour vision which...
- Change Your Personality, Learn A New Language
The personality of people who are bilingual changes depending on which language they use, lending credence to the Czech proverb “Learn a new language and get a new soul”. That’s according to Nairan Ramirez-Esparza and colleagues who assessed the...
- Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Mid-cingulate Cortex
What happens in the brain during a highly immersive reading experience? According to the fiction feeling hypothesis (Jacobs, 2014), narratives with highly emotional content cause a deeper sense of immersion by engaging the affective empathy network to...
Neuroscience
What your favourite Harry Potter House says about your personality
Laura Crysel and colleagues used an online Harry Potter community to get access to the more committed fans found there, and asked them to complete a personality test. Each fan reported their favoured House, and the results showed that significant average personality differences existed between the fans of the different Houses.
Griffendors were the most extraverted, Hufflepuffs more agreeable, Ravenclaws sought more need for cognition, meaning they are excited by intellectual challenge, and Slytherins reported more of the "Dark Triad" personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. As even casual fans of the series will attest, these personality traits are reasonable characterisations of the fictional members of each House.
The feature of the Harry Potter story that I found curious was the sorting hat, used to allocate new magic pupils to one of these four Houses according to their qualities, abilities and beliefs. And following the sorting, the pupils went on to live up to the predictions: those joining Slytherin, for instance, became venomous bullies, cheats or thieves. At face value, it seemed as if the author JK Rowling was endorsing essentialism: people are what they are, or will turn out a certain way in a deterministic fashion, fated to the dark side. But I wondered also whether there was a rather sly critique going on about self-fulfilling prophecies (see our recent work on expectations about poverty to see real-world parallels).
You can turn the same kind of questions from the books to the readers in this study. Were our reader Slytherins always going to top the league for these Dark Triad traits, or did they start mainly thinking that snakes were cool, then, through a process of group identification, increasingly identify with more behaviours and attitudes endorsed by their fictional school-mates, through hundreds of pages? This is something the study can’t answer for us, but due to its influence, longevity, and presentation of characters over time, the Potter series would be a good candidate for examining how fictional in-groups shape our attitudes.
_________________________________
Crysel, L., Cook, C., Schember, T., & Webster, G. (2015). Harry Potter and the measures of personality: Extraverted Gryffindors, agreeable Hufflepuffs, clever Ravenclaws, and manipulative Slytherins Personality and Individual Differences, 83, 174-179 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2015.04.016
Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.
- How Do People With Dark Triad Personality Traits Fare At Speed Dating?
People who score highly in the Dark Triad personality traits – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – are vain, selfish, callous and manipulative. They're not the kind of people you want to spend much time with. This raises the obvious...
- Why Was Darth Vader So Evil? Blame His Lack Of Parental Care, Say Psychologists
Image: wikipediaWhy was Darth Vader such a bad dude? According to a team of psychologists led by Peter Jonason, it's down to his lack of parental care: the fact he was separated from his mother at age 9, and his father's absence. The researchers...
- Creatures Of The Night - People Who Favour The Evening Score Higher On Dark Triad Personality Traits
There are countless examples in nature of biological adaptations going hand in hand with either a nocturnal or diurnal (day-time) lifestyle. For instance, cats have reflective lenses allowing better vision in low light; chimps have colour vision which...
- Change Your Personality, Learn A New Language
The personality of people who are bilingual changes depending on which language they use, lending credence to the Czech proverb “Learn a new language and get a new soul”. That’s according to Nairan Ramirez-Esparza and colleagues who assessed the...
- Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Mid-cingulate Cortex
What happens in the brain during a highly immersive reading experience? According to the fiction feeling hypothesis (Jacobs, 2014), narratives with highly emotional content cause a deeper sense of immersion by engaging the affective empathy network to...