death to capslock

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.

A recent paper published in Journal of Applied Social Psychology found that reader identification with with the main character of Harry Potter (and disidentification with Voldemort) positively correlated with reduced bias toward stigmatized minorities in real life.  Researchers found this Harry Potter effect was significant even after controlling for the general amount of books read, which by itself is strongly associated with reduced bigotry and prejudice.  So, it seems unfair to say the books are nothing but toxic.

What I want to know is the correlation between reading Harry Potter and how people think their ENEMIES should be treated.  And what criteria determine what makes someone "bad" and how badly they deserve to be punished.

http://www.psmag.com/navigation/books-and-culture/harry-potter-battle-bigotry-87002/

*Update

The linked article is correct in its general summation of the findings, but is sloppily written.  I'm not entirely comfortable reproducing the entire paper, but if there are particular sections people would like to see I'll try to either excerpt or summarize them more accurately.  The paper itself is hardly groundbreaking - it's been shown before that reading about foreign perspectives helps increase tolerance.  This mostly showed that the same effect extended to fantasy fiction.  The studies were also extremely narrow in focus (only looking at identification with Harry or Voldemort).  Mostly I thought people would be relieved that SOME good came from such a widely selling series, despite its numerous flaws.