Become Wizards like Harry Potter, Vampires like Twilight

And you don’t even need to be bitten or risk contracting dangerous blood-borne diseases.

It’s actually quite easy, as long as you’re literate, but then again, I think picture books and movies might have the same effect, so maybe you don’t even need to be literate.

But according to Becoming a vampire without being bitten: A new study shows that reading expands our self-concepts, a new study published in Psychological Science, researchers found that when we read, we begin to associate with the heroes, heroines and communities popularized in the story; whether it be a group of superheroes like the X-men, or teenage wizards, or broody glittery vampires.  This association is more than a simple wish-fulfillment or dreams of a child, bur rather holds strong evolutionary psychology for the need to belong to a group larger than yourself.

After getting 140 undergraduate participants to read passages from Twilight or Harry Potter, researchers measured the psychological connection that each participant had toward vampires or wizards.  In one way they measured this was by providing a questionnaire called the “Twilight/Harry Potter Narrative Collective Assimilation Scale” which consisted of questions that would identify someone as a personality that was closer to being a vampire or a wizard.

Participants that read Harry Potter were in a sense wizards, while readers of twilight had become vampires.

Now my question is what if you dislike the books you were forced to read in this study.  If you really didn’t like Harry Potter, would you psychologically relate yourself to being a fanatical religious zealot that wants to eradicate magic and witches?  Or what about Twilight?  Would you instead want to be a werewolf or have dreams of belonging to a group of vicious vampire killers on the quest to stake Edward?

Just wondering