Which Harry Potter house is Alabama?
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If you placed a Sorting Hat on the heads of Harry Potter devotees from Alabama, which “house” would be the most popular in the Yellowhammer State?
In celebration of the 20th Anniversary of J.K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter book (which was released in the U.K. on June 26, 1997), Time Magazine conducted a specialized quiz that determines the “house” fans of the young wizard best fits their personality. After compiling hundreds of thousands of quizzes, Time then created a U.S. map of the houses that were the most popular in each state and published it in an article titled – Find out which Harry Potter house your state belongs in
Which house do you think was the most popular in Alabama?
Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, Slytherin, or Harry’s beloved Gryffindor?
The answer is…. Slytherin.
How does the quiz work?
Time Magazine set out to honor the Harry Potter franchise by re-creating one of its most famous scenes, the first night at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry when the magical hat “sorts out” the students into the four houses.
In lieu of a hat, they developed a “Sorting Hat Quiz” that to date has been taken by over 330,000 participants in the U.S. alone.
Here is how the quiz was developed according to Time:
“In honor of the 20th anniversary of the first volume’s publication on June 26, we thought it was high time to answer this question more rigorously: by teaming up with social scientists from Cambridge University to create a scientific-based quiz on which House best matches your personality…
To accomplish this, we worked with the researchers to develop a 21-question quiz compiled from several well-established scientific personality surveys, choosing questions that related to prevalent themes in the books. Over the past several weeks, we recruited hundreds of Harry Potter fans to take this survey on behalf of 20 different characters from the books, five from each House. The tens of thousands of data points we gathered gave us a detailed portrait of how different personality traits correspond to the personalities of members of each of the four Houses.”
The personality traits of the houses tend to be Ravenclaw for the studious, Hufflepuff for the loyal. Slytherin, for the ambitious and Gryffindor for the brave.
States from the Deep South, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, Florida and Texas were most popular with Slythrin. Interestingly, New York and D.C. joined the “ambitious” Slytherin house.
The states that were tended to be “sorted” to Harry’s house were California, Nevada, Colorado, Oklahoma and Maine. Our neighbor Mississippi was both Gryffindor and Hufflepuff.
Want to see which house you belong to?
Take the quiz today.
