The results showed a reversal effect in which the blue-eyed students showed signs of inferiority and low self-esteem. This procedure is sometimes so subtle that no one notices it happening. It's the Jane Elliott machine. ABC broadcast a documentary about her work. Ms. Elliott, now 87, said she started teaching about racism on April 5, 1968 the day after the Rev. Given the long-term results of the experiment, the controversial study could not have taken place in today's society despite its significant insights on matters racism. Now 45, she had been in Elliott's third grade class in 1969. The next day, Jane made it known to the students that she had made a mistake and that the brown-eyed pupils were better and smarter than their counterparts. The following are some of her most insightful quotes on these issues. ", Elliott says the role of a teacher is to enhance students' moral development. As for the criticism that the exercise encourages children to distrust authority figuresthe teacher lies, then recants the lies and maintains they were justified because of a greater goodshe says she worked hard to rebuild her students' trust. In the most uncomfortable moments, Elliott reminds the students of violent acts caused by racism or homophobia. In the case of any doubt, it's best to consult a trusted specialist. Blue Eyes vs. Brown Eyes Experiment. The hate and discrimination that we see in adults have their origin in their upbringing. The test violated the principle of respect for people's rights and dignity. On Monday, Elliott reversed the exercise, and the brown-eyed kids were told how shifty, dumb and lazy theywere. With a couple of basic and arbitrary examples, Elliott made the case that brown-eyed people were better. American Psychological Association, 4. Junior high, maybe. "Your son got what he deserved," the woman said. She says its because racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, and ethnocentrism are mean and nasty. Typical of their responses was that of Debbie Hughes, who reported that "the people in Mrs. Elliott's room who had brown eyes got to discriminate against the people who had blue eyes. ", A chorus of "Yeahs" went up, and so began one of the most astonishing exercises ever conducted in an American classroom. The killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, was a seismic event, a turning point that compelled many Americans to do something and do it with urgency. Elliott was featured on nearly every national news show in America for decades. What Was The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Experiment? The secretary said the south side of the building was closed, something about waxing the hallways. This was the smaller group. The same experiment was also used a couple of years later with adults. Hire a professional with VAST experience! Introduction. To this day, at the age of 86, Jane Elliott continues this work. The answer, in a word, was nothing. Jane Elliott on The Tonight Show on May 31, 1968. As a journalism professor and author of a book on race that spans more than 50 years, Ive watched these developments with great concern. A columnist at a Denver newspaper called it "evil. Jane Elliott, shown here in 2009, remains an outspoken advocate against racism. The arbitrary division among the students intensified over the course of the experiment, so much so that it actually ended in physical violence. Keep me from judging a man until I have walked a mile in his moccasins. This is a Sioux saying. She then told them that the children with blue eyes were inherently inferior to the children with brown . It makes you proud. The brown-eyed children began to act aggressive and mean towards the blue-eyed children. The next day, Elliott reversed the roles. Undeterred, Elliott tried to appeal to Pauls self-interest. The next day when the tables were turned, "I felt like quitting school. In explaining the experiment rules to the brown-eyed contestants, she addresses the people of color in the room. They don't replace the diagnosis, advice, or treatment of a professional. Elliott split her students into two groups, based on eye color. The secretary on duty looked up, startled, as if she had just seen a ghost. And Im only doing this as an exercise that every child knows is an exercise and every child knows is going to end at the end of the day., We learn to be racist, therefore we can learn not to be racist. The brown-eyed people were told to step to the front of the line. She appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show five times. "It changed my life. "The browneyed people are the better people in this room," Elliott began. When you read about this experiment, its hard not to question labels. Elliotts coworkers avoided her after her appearance on The Tonight Show. Is it even possible today? The Associated Press followed up, quoting Elliott as saying she was "dumbfounded" by the exercise's effectiveness. Even family members can turn against each other if some authority suddenly decides that those differences are a problem. In this article, we talk about leadership and female discrimination.. The episode features with new footage of the students, who are now adults. At her lunch break that day in the teacher's lounge, she told her colleagues about the exercise. Given the ethical concerns, will you still rely on a quasi-experimental research design as a source of information in counselling psychology? At this point you may wish to tell the pupils that you are conducting an "experiment" to look at what prejudice is. Then a picture was taken to remember. Part of the problem is that the blue-eyed group is exclusively white, while the brown-eyed group is predominantly non-white, so that eye colour is no longer an analogue or metaphor for race but a . Why'd they shoot that King?" She nodded. Consequently, the brown-eyed children started using blue-eyes as an insult. However, the study shows some bias in the sample size and race of participants. Cookie Settings, Kids Start Forgetting Early Childhood Around Age 7, Archaeologists Discover Wooden Spikes Described by Julius Caesar, Artificial Sweetener Tied to Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke, Study Finds, Rare Jurassic-Era Insect Discovered at Arkansas Walmart. Why do researchers use correlational studies? Thousands of educators across the United States folded the experiment into their curriculums. Was The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Experiment Ethical? PracticalPie.com is a participant in the Amazon Associates Program. ", That spring morning 37 years ago, the blue-eyed children were set apart from the children with brown or green eyes. Even though some of the children said yes, Elliott pushed back. Elliott flew to the NBC studio in New York City. They are steeped in centuries of economic deprivation and cultural appropriation. Days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. . She believed that experience was the only way her students could understand how it felt like to be discriminated. Essay Sample: Ethical Concerns in Jane Elliot's Experiment. This was intentional. Problems with this research were that it went against a lot of ethical issues. Why are we still talking about this experiment over 50 years later? The interaction only strengthened Elliott's resolve. They embraced the experiments reductive message, as well as its promised potential, thereby keeping the implausible rationale of Elliotts crusade alive and well for decades, however flawed and racist it really was. The blue eyes/brown eyes experiment, which could last one to three days, was at a glance similar to other human-potential-movement workshops of the era, including Werner Erhard's est training . "Well, what do you expect from him, Mrs. Elliott," a brown-eyed student said as a blue-eyed student got an arithmetic problem wrong. "That's what I tried to teach, and that's what drove the other teachers crazy. In a grassy front yard down the block is a hand-lettered sign: "Glads for Sale, 3 for $1." Her class, people are better than blue-eyed people. The act of treating students differently was obviously a metaphor for the social decisions made on a larger level. You must get the parents first. It seemed to evince that all white people had to do to learn about racism was restrain themselves from an impulse to engage in made-up cruelty. These are the sources and citations used to research Jane Elliott's blue eye brown eye case study is/isn't more ethical than Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment. In the brown eyed/blue eyed experiment Jane Elliot told her third graders with blue eyes that they were better than the brown-eyed children. She asked her students, who were all white, whether or not they knew what it felt like to be judged by the color of their skin. Thats just the way blue-eyed kids were, Elliott told the students. The students were surprised, but they didnt argue. Some people feel we can't move on when you have her out there hawking her 30-year-old experiment. Ethical & Pedagogical Issues 2. Jane Elliott, an educator and anti-racism activist, first conducted her blue eyes/brown eyes exercise in her third-grade classroom in Iowa in 1968. Below, . She was hesitant to enroll in Elliotts workshop but was told that if she wanted to succeed as a manager, shed have to attend. 980 Words. "Brown-eyed people have more of that chemical in their eyes, so brown-eyed people are better than those with blue eyes," Elliott said. "We are repeating the blue-eyed/brown-eyed exercise on a daily basis.". ", "I've never forgotten the exercise," Whisenhunt volunteered. SYNOPSIS OF BLUE EYED. "It's Riceville 30 years ago. Written and verified by the psychologist Francisco Roballo. Delivery in 6+ hours! The minimal group paradigm has shaped an entire methodology in social psychology. "Hey, Mrs. Elliott," Steven yelled as he slung his books on his desk. Terms of Use One teacher ended up displaying the same bigotry Elliott had spent the morning trying to fight. Jane Elliott has done a lot of reflection about the consequences of the minimal group experiment. But they returned to a better placeunlike a child of color, who gets abused every day, and never has the ability to find him or herself in a nurturing classroom environment." Immediately after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Professor Jane Elliott used the minimal group paradigm to perform an experiment that would teach her students about race discrimination. I interviewed Julie Pasicznyk, who had been working for US West, a giant telecommunications company in Minneapolis. But Paul, one of eight siblings and the son of a dairy farmer, didnt buy Elliotts mollification. She wanted them to understand what discrimination felt like. Elliott asked. She gave all of the students simple spelling and math tests two weeks before the exercise, on the days of the exercise, and after the exercise. Elliott started to see her own white privilege, even her own ignorance. Jane Elliott and Dr. On April 5 1968 the day after the death of Martin Luther King Jr Elliott decided to show her students how easy it was to be influenced by racism. Many critics that the children were too young to understand the exercise. She has appeared on the "Oprah Winfrey Show" five times. ", We stopped on Woodlawn Avenue, and a woman in her mid-40s approached us on the sidewalk. She wanted to show her students that an arbitrarily established difference could separate them and pit them against each other. We have to let people find out how it feels to be on the receiving end of that which we dish out so readily.". Jane Elliott, a teacher and anti-racism activist, performed a direct experiment with the students in her classroom. The blue eyes brown eyes study was a study on group prejudice and discrimination conducted by Jane Elliot. "Eye color, hair color and skin color are caused by a chemical," Elliott went on, writing MELANIN on the blackboard. Children with brown eyes were forced to wear armbands that made it easy for people to see that they had brown eyes. The exercise is "an inoculation against racism," she says. To most people, it seemed to suggest that racism could be reduced, even eliminated, by a one- or two-day exercise. And they are smarter than blue-eyed people." The brown-eyed children got to sit in the front of the room, to go to lunch first, and to have more time at recess. Almost immediately, it was apparent that she had created segregation and prejudice given that the blue-eyed students began exhibiting signs of dominion and superiority. In doing the research for my book with scores of peoples who were participants in the experiment, I reached out to Elliott. And the exercise continued in a similar fashion to how it was executed the day before. While controversial, the Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise continues to be one of the most well-known and praised learning exercises in the world of educational psychology. Then tell them that . Before proceeding with the test, she began with random questions to fully understand the children's perception of Negroes. Disclaimer: SpeedyPaper.com is a custom writing service that provides online on-demand writing work for assistance purposes. When she separated the class by eye color and announced that blue-eyed children were superior, Paul Bodensteiner objected at every turn. This meeting, along with other clips of the exercises impact on education, is featured in a PBS documentary called A Class Divided. Would you like to find out? Perhaps because the outcome seemed so optimistic and comforting, coverage of Elliott and the experiments alleged curative powers cropped up everywhere. She decided to continue the exercise with her students after lunch. Mary and Zeke have three children, all of whom have blue eyes. Elliott, who is white, separated the students into two groupsthose with blue eyes and those with brown eyes. The ethical concerns arising from the experiment are consent and deception. Jane Elliott's brown eye/blue eye experiment starts at 03:10 of A Class Divided. The roots of racism and why it continues unabated in America and other nations are complicated and gnarled. Nevertheless, Elliott became as famous as a teacher could become in America. ", Vision and tenacity may get results, but they don't always endear a person to her neighbors. She has spoken at more than 350 colleges and universities. Elliot wanted to show that the same thing happens in real life with brown eyed people (minority). Some residents were furious. He printed them under the headline "How Discrimination Feels." Danko, M. (2013). Brown-eyed people, she told the students, are smarter, more civilized and better than blue-eyed people. The next day, Jane made it known to the students that she had made a mistake and that the brown-eyed pupils were better and smarter than their counterparts. She was 10 before the farmhouse had running water and electricity. When Sarah, the Elliotts' oldest daughter, went to the girls' bathroom in junior high, she came out of a stall to see a message scrawled in red lipstick on the mirror: "Nigger lover.". The brown-eyed children could take off their armbands and give them to the blue-eyed children, who were now taught that they were inferior to the brown-eyed children. Classroom experiment. And our number two freedom is the freedom to deny that were ignorant., I want every white person in this room who would be happy to be treated as this society in general treats our citizens, our black citizens, if you, as a white person, would be happy to receive the same treatment that our black citizens do in this society, please stand. . The contents of Exploring Your Mind are for informational and educational purposes only. Barbie had to have a Ken, so Elliott picked from the audience a tall, handsome man and accused him of doing the same things with his female subordinates, Pasicznyk said. We use them to divide and destroy people., White peoples number one freedom, in the United States of America, is the freedom to be totally ignorant of those who are other than white. Elliott was even brought on The Tonight Show to talk about her experiences. The experiment is to help the children to understand about prejudice and discrimination. She had never met me, and she accused me in front of everyone of using my sexuality to get ahead.. A difference as simple as eye color, defined and established by the authority figure, created a rift between the students. Exploring your mind Blog about psychology and philosophy. The students initially involved wished that everyone could participate in an exercise like this. ", When I met Elliott in 2003, she hadn't been back to Riceville in 12 years. Locals say that drivers don't signal when they turn because everyone knows where everyone else is going. New York: Elsevier Science. In the 60s, the United States was in the midst of a social race crisis. THE ANGRY EYE , a 35-minute video, features Jane Elliott conducting her Blue Eyed/Brown Eyed exercise with college students. "She was an excellent school teacher, but she has a way about her," says 90-year-old Riceville native Patricia Bodenham, who has known Elliott since Jane was a baby. Even though the response to the Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise was initially negative, it made Jane Elliott a leading figure in diversity training. Having in mind that it would be difficult to explain to third graders about discrimination, she needed to be more practical so that her student could understand how discrimination and prejudice felt. The brown-eyed children felt suddenly that they were discriminated, while the blue eyed started seeing them as inferior. "She taught in this school for 18 years." Elliott had hoped that this experiment would help the children to better understand the feelings of discrimination that certain groups feel on a daily basis, but what she didn . In Jane Elliott's experiment she made the third graders believe that the blue eyed people were better,than the brown eyed people. "That you, Ms. "She could get kids to do anything she wanted them to," he says of Elliott. These initial criticisms didnt stop Elliott. On the second day of the experiment, Elliott switched the childrens roles. Regardless of age, gender, race, ethnicity or socioeconomic status, decision making in psychology should protect individual rights and welfare to eliminate potential biases. Jane Elliott's experiment. Carson asked, grinning. "She stirs people up. 10," Elliott said. Kids on top would tease the children who were deemed as the inferior group. Jane Elliot's experiment involves cheating and intentional misinterpretation of facts. The blue-eyed participants faced discrimination for two and a half hours. Website. Elliott rattled off the rules for the day, saying blue-eyed kids had to use paper cups if they drank from the water fountain. Melanin, she said, is what causes intelligence. This bibliography was generated on Cite This For Me on Monday, March 7, 2016. More than 50 years after she first tried that exercise in her classroom, Elliott, now 87, said she sees much more work left to do to change racist attitudes. One of the main ones was the fact that their right to withdraw was taken away from them. It has since evolved into an online blog and YouTube channel providing mental health advice, tools, and academic support to individuals from all backgrounds. Words are the most powerful weapon devised by humankind. Essay Example, Essay Example on Racism Towards Black People, Essay Sample about Developing a Campaign for School Intimidation, Essay Example on Therapist-Client Relationship Boundaries, Islamic Perspective on Euthanasia, Free Essay Sample. 5/21/2020 Topic: Module 2 Discussion: ", A former teacher, Ruth Setka, 79, said she was perhaps the only teacher who would still talk to Elliott. We use them to divide and destroy people., On Understanding The Different Ways We Treat Other Races, Philip Zimbardo (Biography + Experiments). Everyone looked at Mrs. Elliott. ", 2023 Smithsonian Magazine That spring morning 37 years ago, the blue-eyed children were set apart from the children with brown or green eyes. You didnt understand the directions. Almost immediately, it was apparent that she had created segregation and prejudice given that the blue-eyed students began exhibiting signs of dominion and superiority. "They are cleaner and they are smarter.". 10 Psychological Experiments That Could Never Happen Today. one girl asked. Open Document. Basically, you establish differences between a set of subjects in order to divide them into separate groups. Watch it online right now! I was stunned. The blue-eyed participants faced discrimination for two and a half hours. "If this ugly change, if this negative change can happen this quickly, why can't positive change happen that quickly? As the morning wore on, brown-eyed kids berated their blue-eyed classmates. March 26, 1985. That's what it feels like when you're discriminated against.". Additionally, the brown-eyed students got to sit in the front of the class, while the blue-eyed kids . "I don't think this community was ready for what she did," he said. Cookie Policy It also documents small-town White America's reflex reaction to the . In 1970, she demonstrated it for educators at a White House Conference on Children and Youth. I felt like quitting school. Elliott created the blue-eyes/brown-eyes classroom exercise in 1968 to teach students about racism. It was the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968 that Elliott ran her first "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" exercise in her Riceville, Iowa classroom. The people and cultures already present in a place often feel threatened by new immigrants. "We just want to peek in," I volunteered. Now, almost four decades later, Elliott's experiment still mattersto the grown children with whom she experimented, to the people of Riceville, population 840, who all but ran her out of town, and to thousands of people around the world who have also participated in an exercise based on the experiment.