More People Need(ed) to Read Harry Potter

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

I know, a provocative title in this community, but we have concrete evidence that reading Harry Potter leads to a small, but significant, increase in antipathy toward Donald Trump and his policies.

https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/new-study-shows-reading-harry-potter-lowers-americans%E2%80%99-opinions-donald-trump ; (Link through to the actual study in article.)

A while back I posted about a study that found that identifying with Harry Potter led to decreased bias toward stigmatized minorities.  At the time, I wondered how reading the series led people to feel about how to deal with their enemies given the vindictiveness the series shows in a close reading.  As it turns out, the more Harry Potter books someone has read, even controlling for "party identification, gender, education level, age, evangelical self-identification, and social dominance orientation," the more opposed they were to violence and punitive policies (like torturing their enemies as advocated by Trump) and authoritarianism.  This is in addition to confirmation of the decreased bias against outgroups.

You don't have to like Harry Potter, and I completely agree that the books have a lot of problems.  But let's not loose sight of the fact that the world is entering a dangerous, if not outright fascistic period.  There's too much hatred and divisiveness driving our politics; hate crimes have risen by several hundred percent since Trump's election.  If reading Harry Potter does help lead people to greater tolerance and mercy, we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Comments

[zigadenus.livejournal.com]

And the data didn't address Republican vs Democrat at all

I should clarify this in that specific ideologies defining Republican vs Democrat were not addressed. There could be many reasons why a person chooses one or another. Everything from critical study to family tradition of voting for a particular party may be at play. Thus, voting affiliation may tell us very little about personal political beliefs. A better way to determine ideology (if you want to make sweeping statements about Republican vs Democrat), is to include in the survey a set of questions where the participant is asked to rank how much they agree or disagree with lists of ideological statements -- just like VoteCompass. From that, you cluster the participants as ideological Republicans, Democrats, etc. It has the value of being replicable.

To explain what I mean by that, let's examine how it is potentially erroneous and leading to draw parallels between this study and statements like "Republicans are less likely to read books". While there may indeed be studies that demonstrate that, we do not know if those studies are defining 'Republican' the same way as it is defined here. 'Voter affiliation' is useless without context -- someone who affiliated themselves with the Republicans under GW Bush might hesitate to do so under Trump; someone with Democratic affiliation under Clinton may not have voted for Gore. So depending upon when a study was conducted, it may be comparing different parts of the population entirely.