The Caveman Goes to Hogwarts

The final Harry Potter movie opens this week, and this is a perfect moment to revisit the evolutionary themes in movies. As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, we believe that nearly all popular movies contain four main themes that appeal to our evolved brains. Getting along, getting the girl, getting ahead, and getting the bad guy. Anyone who has seen the Harry Potter movies or read the books knows that the Harry Potter series deals in depth with all of these themes. Voldemort is the ultimate bad guy, continuously hunting for Harry, after having already murdered Harry’s parents along with countless other victims. Harry frequently struggles to get along with his two close friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. As Harry gains status, he becomes quite attractive to the girls around him, and eventually gets the girl. And of course, Harry gets ahead, going from a poor unloved orphan forced to live in a cupboard, to a wealthy celebrity tasked with saving the entire world.

Besides all the connections between Harry and the natural world, however, there is something else that makes the Harry Potter books so interesting: Not only does he “Get ahead” socially and financially – he (spoiler alert!) learns magic.

Of course, Harry Potter isn’t the only popular fictional character to learn magic. Luke Skywaker, Peter Parker (Spiderman), Jake Sully (Avatar), and virtually every other comic book character in history has mastered some sort of magic.

So, this raises the question, what is it that’s so appealing about magic to our evolved brains?

Many psychologist believe that magical thinking provides a psychological pat on the back, designed to make us feel better, despite having no effect on the world. A New York Times article on the psychology of magic stated -

For people who are generally uncertain of their own abilities, or slow to act because of feelings of inadequacy, this kind of thinking can be an antidote, a needed activator, said Daniel M. Wegner, a professor of psychology at Harvard (who coauthored a study on voodoo).

From an evolutionary perspective, this sort of thinking may not have been quite so maladaptive, especially you consider that our ancestors hardly understand how anything worked. Chances are, a person who based his or her actions on things that seemed to go together (even if he didn’t understand the reason) was much more likely to survive than someone who didn’t. If someone notices feeling stronger after eating a certain type of food, he would do well to eat more of it. If he felt worse after eating that food two weeks later when it had turned green around the edges a bit of “magical thinking” about the dangers of green could have saved his life. And even as our knowledge base grew, it may have occasionally paid to assume that we had control of things that may at first seem out of our control. For example, even in modern times, Michael Jordan and Tony Hawk have both done things that seem (to me) every bit as impossible as Harry Potter flying around on a broom, and in the ancestral environment, those sorts of feats may have been the difference between reaching fruit that seemed impossibly out of reach, and simply starving. From the inventor of the wheel to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, creating muggle technology that other people thought impossible has always been a successful strategy.

It is instructive that even though Harry Potter is genetically predisposed toward wizardry, it doesn’t come naturally to him. He must study it. He cannot simply wave his wand and hope for the best. While he doesn’t study the theory he does study the techniques. While nobody seems to understand the exact physics of a wand or the chemistry of potions, Harry does learn to say Wingardium Leviosa with the emphasis right on the o, as well as the exact ingredients for Polyjuice Potion (or at the very least, he learns which of his friends to turn to for this information). And this rigorous and dedicated willingness to keep trying to control seemingly random events almost certainly helped our ancestors, and still helps us today.

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