House Pride (wasRe: Sorting Hat (was: muggle baiting...)/Arthur is right or not?

[Joe Goodwin]

No: HPFGUIDX 155919


Sydney <sydpad at yahoo.com> wrote:

Something to bear in mind is the so-called "Pygmalion Effect", the
phenomenon of self-fullfilling expectations. There was a famous
experiment where teachers were randomly told one class was 'gifted'
and one class of similar students were 'slow'. Huge differences in
performance where of course what resulted. It's a very well-known
experiment and I'd be surprised if JKR, who was a teacher after all,
would be unaware of it. (write-up here:
http://fcis.oise.utoronto.ca/~daniel_schugurensky/assignment1/1968rosenjacob.html).

It's hard to think of a more classic scenario that would produce such
an effect than to put a hat on an 11-year-old, tell them it's a magic
hat that knows who they really are inside, and then tell some of them
that they are brave and good and some of them that they are cunning
and selfish. Of course it's going to result in different behaviours.
<SNIP>


Joe:
 Of course in a world with magic it could have nothing to do with real world issues. The Sorting Hat could "just know" what the kids are like and be right about it.

  I think we always want for their to be a real world reason for everything in the HP universe and as such we tend to read more into a lot of things in the book that are meant to be taken at face value. JKR has has shown that House values don't always translate into good or evil with Peter Pettigrew and yet I don't think the fact that most of the DE's are Slytherins can be attributed to the Hat saying you belong in a House reknowned for cunning.

  In fact unless we know how the Hat knows what it knows everything is almost certainly evidence free speculation, enjoyable as it might be.

  Joe