Harry Potter and the SPELL against bullying

The Harry Potter saga has been—and still is—a worldwide phenomenon, attracting the interest of millions of people. Leveraging this success and the potential for the storyline to act as a moral guide, we developed and tested the SPELL, a scientifically-driven anti-bullying intervention based on the Harry Potter novels. The main goal of this intervention was to foster children and adolescents' willingness to intervene in response to bullying episodes. Participants were middle-school students (N = 343, Mage = 12.18 years), who engaged in four sessions designed to raise awareness about bullying, including its forms, roles of the different bullying actors, its consequences and ways to address it. The sessions also focused on psychological constructs identified in the literature as crucial in fostering bystander intervention, namely empathy, moral disengagement and defender self-efficacy. Results revealed that the intervention, when compared with a control condition, was successful in fostering intentions to counteract bullying, with greater empathy and lower moral disengagement being the psychological processes underlying this effect; evidence for self-efficacy was weaker. Our findings suggest that the powerful magic of Harry Potter can help to create a better world for children and adolescents, as future generations. Please refer to the Supporting Information section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.