The Psychology of Harry Potter An Unauthorized Examination of the Boy Who Lived (Psychology of Popular Culture series)

by Neil Mulholland (Editor) in stores May 1, 2007

Genres:

Non-Fiction, Pop Culture

Themes:

essays , Harry Potter , psychology

Book Excerpt

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Harry's Curiosity (Excerpt Essay)
by Susan Engel, Ph.D., and Sam Levin

Engel and Levin beg to differ. Curiosity is not dead at Hogwarts, they argue. What exactly is curiosity? What can we learn about curiosity from studying Harry? And what role does Harry’s curiosity play in his efforts to fight Voldemort? Finally, why can’t we make our schools more like Hogwarts to really encourage curiosity in all students?

Poor Harry. His curiosity gets him in big trouble. Right from the start, he suffers terribly because he’s so interested in answering questions, solving puzzles, and figuring things out. His curiosity causes him endless time locked in a closet, smacks on the head, and other nasty punishments at the hands of the Dursleys: his aunt, uncle, and cousin, who hate him because of his secret past.

Lucky Harry. His curiosity helps him to be smart and appealing, and it launches him on many of his adventures. Right from the start he wants to find things out, and his inquisitiveness leads him on escapades that bring him pleasure, excitement, satisfaction, knowledge, and, in the end, the high regard of all around him.

What is it about Harry and the events, objects, and people around him that make him so curious?

The Harry Potter series tells the story of one child’s quest to satisfy his curiosity. Most of the exciting events of the books occur because Harry is trying to figure something out. His curiosity is the invisible backbone to the story, just as it is the invisible backbone to much of children’s thinking and behavior. As we watch Harry try to answer questions and solve mysteries, the psychological components of curiosity come to life. Is Harry more curious than other children? If he is, what made him this way? What happens when the Dursleys try to crush it out of him?

Researchers view curiosity as both an internal and stable characteristic (a trait) of a person and also a transitory set of feelings and behaviors caused by specific features of a situation (a state). In other words, Harry is by nature a curious boy, but his environment might make anyone curious. A close look at Harry’s curiosity allows us to see what it is about a situation that encourages or discourages inquiry. Finally, Harry’s adventures, at home and at school, provide an excellent blueprint for what it would take to create an environment that encourages curiosity.

What Is Curiosity?

From the first pages of the first book, Harry is gripped by a powerful urge to find out more. He asks questions, explores the environment around him, closely observes interesting phenomena, and dwells on complex events that he doesn’t fully understand. All of these are considered by psychologists to be manifestations of curiosity. But notice that asking questions, venturing into forbidden spaces, and jumping on brooms are all behaviors that express curiosity, while the thoughts and feelings Harry has while lying in his bed are just that—internal experiences. One of the interesting ambiguities of curiosity is that it is both an internal experience and a set of behaviors. Daniel Berlyne, the first psychologist to empirically investigate curiosity, wanted to capture the nexus between the internal feeling, the behaviors that resulted from the feeling, and the features of the environment that elicited both feeling and behavior. His studies, done in the early sixties, showed that when a person encounters surprise, novelty, and complexity, he or she experiences arousal, which leads to exploration. In one of the first experiments involving humans, Berlyne asked subjects long lists of questions about invertebrates and also asked them to rate the questions in terms of how surprising and interesting the questions were. Then subjects were given long lists of randomly ordered answers to those questions. Finally, they were given the original questionnaire a second time. Just as Berlyne predicted, subjects were more able to answer those questions they had rated as surprising or engaging. Berlyne concluded from this that when a subject confronts surprise, he or she is aroused. Getting the answer to a surprising question reduces that arousal. This arousal reduction, which feels good, reinforces the subject’s learning of that item. When Harry is asked at Hogwarts to learn about the study of magical plants, the very possibility that plants are magical surprises him. We can predict, based on Berlyne’s work, that Harry will learn the information better because the topic is unexpected and novel. Berlyne’s work underscores the fact that curiosity is both invisible (an internal feeling) and visible (a behavior).

But of course, not all phenomena are complex or unexpected in the same way. Early in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry wonders how he got the lightning bolt-shaped scar on his head: “He had had it as long as he could remember, and the first question he could ever remember asking his Aunt Petunia was how he had gotten it” (Sorcerer’s Stone 20). Harry’s curiosity about his scar is a long-term type of curiosity about how something came to be. There is nothing new about the scar, nothing suddenly unexpected. Yet it is unexplained. In this instance, Harry exemplifies developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan’s view—that curiosity is the urge to resolve uncertainty. Harry knows that the scar is unusual—no one else has one, people notice his, and he knows it must have been caused by something. He wants to resolve the uncertainty of how he got the scar.

On the other hand, Harry also encounters more specific and momentary kinds of unexplained phenomena. When he travels to Hogwarts for the first time, he is instructed to depart from Platform 9 ¾. Naturally, this defies anything he has experienced or come to expect. Momentary phenomena like this can also elicit curiosity. When he has been rescued by Hagrid, the giant, and wonderful, strange things have begun to happen to Harry, his thoughts turn to inquiry: “Questions exploded inside Harry’s head like fireworks and he couldn’t decide which to ask first” (Sorceror’s Stone 52).

The renowned developmental psychologist Jean Piaget described curiosity as the urge to explain incongruity. In other words, children have expectations, what he called “schema,” which guide their experiences and behavior. When something happens that doesn’t fit a child’s schema, he or she wants to find or figure out why. This definition of curiosity helps us understand why babies and toddlers seem so curious so much of the time. They don’t have many schemas, nor are their schemas very complex, so they encounter numerous objects and events that don’t fit their few simple schemas. This means all kinds of everyday experiences seem incongruous to them and require an “explanation.”

Especially during the first book, Harry has some of the wide-eyed wonder we associate with toddlers. Perhaps that is because the world of magic he is introduced to is full of new and incongruous experiences, just as the ordinary world is for Muggle toddlers. In Diagon Alley, Harry sees all kinds of things that violate his expectations: disappearing entrances, magic brooms, stores filled with cauldrons, and very odd-looking people. Everything he encounters there is unfamiliar. Like a toddler, he now constantly has to resolve discrepancies between what he already knows and what he encounters. Nothing he has experienced living at Number Four, Privet Drive has led him to expect that men will dress in long robes with wizard hats, yet here they do. At Privet Drive, animals didn’t talk, and sticks could not do magic. From Piaget’s perspective, these incongruities should create a state of almost perpetual curiosity and learning.

While all babies encounter novelty almost every day, by the time children are Harry’s age, there is less incongruity in their everyday lives, and, perhaps as a result, fewer children over the age of five exhibit curiosity on a regular basis. This may be why some research has shown that curiosity typically wanes between the ages of four and eleven. But unlike other boys of his age, Harry’s world is filled with phenomena begging for explanation. If the internal feeling of curiosity is caused by unexplained phenomena or the urge to resolve uncertainty, can we find out what it is about certain environments that elicit or encourage curiosity more than others?

What in the World Makes Us Curious?

In the earliest psychological experiments on curiosity, Berlyne showed that more complex problems elicited more curiosity. Since then, psychologists have continued to tease apart and identify the specific features of a situation that are more likely to spark a person’s curiosity. In one interesting study, subjects were presented with several items designed to evoke curiosity, such as a small object with windows, lights, and protruding knobs. Some of the children were actively encouraged by the adult to explore the interesting object, while other children were neither encouraged nor discouraged to explore. The researchers measured how long it took kids to come up to the object (or similar item) and investigate it. Children explored the item more quickly when they were encouraged to. When they got no active encouragement, fewer of them approached the object, and those who did took longer. Moreover, the same child would approach the object when encouraged to and hang back when not given active encouragement. In other words, the situation was more powerful than the individual in determining the level of curiosity expressed.

The psychologist Richard Henderson wanted to identify the specific features of an environment that might encourage or discourage a child’s display of curiosity. He devised a method that bears just a hint of the kind of invitation to explore that is replete in Harry’s world. In Henderson’s work, children of various ages were brought into a lab containing a variety of toys and academic materials, including a “curiosity box.” This was a small box with a number of drawers on all sides, each of which contained some unusual or novel object. When children entered the lab, Henderson watched to see how quickly they went to explore the box (clearly the most unexpected and complex object in the room). Henderson also counted the number of drawers a child opened, how many of the objects the child removed to examine, and how long he or she spent exploring each of those objects. Taken together, these measures comprised a “curiosity score.” Henderson found that while some children opened more drawers and manipulated objects for longer, this was mediated by other factors. For instance, children spent more time on the objects that seemed more exotic and complicated. The younger children in the study were more likely to explore the objects when their parents were present, though both older and younger children were also affected by what their parents actually did and said while in the room. In other words, the children had different levels of curiosity, but they were almost all influenced by various features of the situation.

In one recent study in our lab, we tried a different version of the curiosity box experiment. Instead of bringing the children to the lab, we brought the box to the children’s classrooms. In that setting, we learned something new. Previous research had suggested that children’s curiosity wanes with age. Given Piaget’s definition, it’s easy to see why—less incongruity, more familiarity. But the story is not that simple. In our study, when kids were free to approach the box during a regular school day, we found that the older children (nine-yearolds, in this case) were more likely to investigate the box in small peer groups, while five-year-olds tended to approach the box alone. Perhaps what begins as a solitary activity in early childhood becomes a social activity. This is certainly the case for Harry, who, upon arriving at Hogwarts, instantly finds comrades, Ron and Hermione, to join him, willingly and unwillingly, on his adventures.

So, Harry’s environment fulfills all the situational requirements for high levels of curiosity. It is filled with uncertainty, violations of expectations, complex phenomena that elicit exploration and cognition, and peers. But in one respect, Harry doesn’t, at least at first, get much of what research tells us you need: adults who sanction exploration. He spends his first ten years with a family whose primary goal seems to keep Harry (and everyone else) from finding out their secret. In other words, curiosity is their enemy.

When Harry dreams of a flying motorcycle, he mistakenly tells his uncle, who furiously silences Harry by barking at him, “‘MOTORCYCLES DON’T FLY!’” (Sorcerer’s Stone 25). Indeed, “If there was one thing the Dursleys hated even more than his asking questions, it was his talking about anything acting in a way it shouldn’t, no matter if it was in a dream or even a cartoon—they seemed to think he might get dangerous ideas” (Sorcerer’s Stone 26). The Durselys’ worst nightmare is the kind of unexplained phenomena and violated expectations likely to elicit questions and investigations. But Harry is curious even when his curiosity is punished. He doesn’t give up wanting to know who his parents are, where they came from, how he got his scar, or what is in the letter that keeps arriving through every hole in his aunt and uncle’s house. Is Harry more curious than other kids? If so, why?

Is Curiosity a Trait?

The answer is yes, and we shouldn’t be surprised. A substantial number of studies have shown that there are measurable and fairly stable

Is there a need for mental health treatment in Rowling’s wizarding world? In the Western-world mental health, we have developed an elaborate classification and labeling system for diagnosing people’s problems. In Harry’s world, they seem quite comfortable simply labeling someone “mad.” There seem to be no specific counselors to help students at Hogwarts with mental or emotional diffculties, no psychiatrists at St. Mungo’s healing the mentally unstable. Could wizards learn something from us Muggles, or do they have all the support they need?

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