How Harry Potter Has Influenced Millennial Views

By Nina Rodríguez-Marty on February 5, 2016

You know him as the Chosen One. You’ve read the books and attended the midnight premiers. You’ve been to the amusement park. You own a wand. It even flashes and everything.

Seriously, who doesn’t know Harry Potter?

J.K. Rowling’s boy under the cupboard has undoubtedly captured the hearts and minds of millions across the world. The Harry Potter fandom is a unique community. You’ve got young children, temperamental teenagers, college students desperately grasping on to their youth, and full-blown working adults sneaking the books in their purse to read during their kid’s soccer practice.

I once met a man who began to read the Sorcerer’s Stone to his five-year-old son before bed. He got so hooked he finished the entire Harry Potter series on his own three days later.

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Pottermania is real, people.

I grew up with Harry. No, I never received my Hogwarts acceptance letter, but I read the books. I watched the movies. I even bought the wand (and the tie, and the glasses, and the board game, etc.).

What if I told you that my political values have been directly influenced by the boy-who-lived?

What if I told you that this impact extends to the entire Millennial Generation?

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This is what Anthony Gierzynski proves in his 2013 book Harry Potter and the Millennials: Research Methods and the Politics of the Muggle Generation.

According to a national survey Gierzynski conducted, “reading the [Harry Potter books] correlated with greater levels of acceptance for out-groups, higher political tolerance, less predisposition to authoritarianism, greater support for equality and greater opposition to the use of violence and torture” (Gierzynski, “How ‘Harry Potter’ shaped the political culture of a generation,” The Washington Post.) This shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering the major themes of the series. Interestingly, Gierzynski’s research also accounts for other predictors of political attitudes, including parental upbringing. Nevertheless, the results remain the same. Harry Potter is just that influential.

There has been a recently expanding field of study focusing on this specific impact, and Harry Potter and the Millennials is not the only study to reveal a significant correlation between media consumption and political views. In fact, a study revealed that viewers of Game of Thrones are less likely to believe in a just world.

Go figure.

So, why should you care?

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With a spin-off movie coming out in November and a sequel play underway, Harry Potter’s influence is long from over. The stories we love live forever, directly affecting the things we believe and the decisions we make. This should propel us to be more intentional about the things we allow to hold influence. It’s a good thing, then, that the boy-who-lived will keep on living.

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