We’re deeply grateful to the readers who opted into contributing to the research-and, yet again, apologize if the result wasn’t the House you wanted.Congratulations - you belong in Slytherin house. But I don’t think I’ve ever been so proud of a project as one that also flips that exchange of information from the readers back to the scientists. It is always gratifying to bring science to a popular audience in a way that is both entertaining and honest. Much of the best interactive journalism, in my experience, tells users something about themselves that wouldn’t be possible without a real-time computational output, even if the apparent subject matter is a popular fantasy series. While the researchers generously acknowledge TIME’s Harry Potter quiz as the source of the data, the teenage wizard was merely a vehicle to collect non-magical data on regional differences in personality. metropolitan regions, finding a fascinating correlation between a region’s scores on the courage-related questions (which tend to mean there were a lot of Gryffindors) and entrepreneurial activity, with a catch: Those regions with more risk tolerance had lower survival rates for new business startups, even when controlling for a variety of outside influences. The first paper to result from this largesse drew on 390,341 respondents from 283 U.S.

When we were finally ready to publish the final product, I warned him that the popularity of a digital interactive is largely unpredictable, particularly in such well-charted waters as a Sorting Hat quiz, but that I was cautiously optimistic that we could get about 10,000 consenting participants.Īs of January 2019, that figure was north of 1.6 million respondents from around the world. I suspect that Götz and I exchanged several hundred emails over the many weeks we spent assembling this partnership as he took the lead in coordinating matters from Cambridge’s end. Those who did opt-in were asked an additional five demographic questions that did not influence their House assignment. A small, innocuous cookie prevented repeat users from submitting their data twice. (The board did not exercise any editorial input over the surrounding presentation.) To ensure that this experiment was above-board, we began the quiz with a slide describing the experiment, provided a detailed description of the research goals, and left the option for readers to consent to contributing their responses unchecked so that participating was an opt-in decision. In exchange for their expertise, TIME worked with the Cambridge scientists to submit our interactive feature to the university’s rigorous ethics board, which carefully examined the questions for any potential ethical concerns before green-lighting the study. We felt that these five characteristics neatly encompassed the qualities of the four Houses. Together, those students - Friedrich Götz and Joe Scott - assembled a “Harry Potter Personality Inventory,” 21 questions drawn from four existing personality surveys and measuring five personality traits: Courage, Agreeableness, Honesty/Humility, Conscientiousness and Machiavellianism. Rentfrow generously lent us the time of several of his graduate students, two of whom were avowed Harry Potter fans, conveniently enough. Jason Rentfrow, the Cambridge behavioral scientist with whom my colleague Jeffrey Kluger and I worked to create the state personality quiz in 2013. We were going to create a scientific Sorting Hat Quiz that invited readers to both get an accurate House assignment and, should they wish, contribute to scientific research in the process. Rowling’s official fan site for all things Potter. There was only one problem: There were already at least a dozen such quizzes out there, including one on, J. House assignments are a seminal part of the Harry Potter mythopoeia: On their first night, new Hogwarts students each don the talking Sorting Hat, an ancient wizard cap that probes students’ psyche and determines which of the four Houses best suits them. In the course of bandying about ideas for a digital interactive to contribute to our coverage, we kept coming back to a quiz that would assign readers into one of the four Houses at Hogwarts: Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff or Slytherin. In the spring of 2017, TIME was gearing up for the vaunted 20th anniversary of the first Harry Potter novel, which hit shelves in the United Kingdom on June 26, 1997.

Potter’s cap is the result of a partnership between TIME and social scientists at the University of Cambridge that shows a new way academics and journalists can work together. So I’m pleased to report that he can now pad his curriculum vitae with a contribution to new, original research in the peer-reviewed Journal of Personality.

For all his triumphs, Harry Potter was seldom more than a “reasonably talented” student at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Harry potter sorting hat quiz for kids