A Psychological Study That Changed our Perception
Psychological experiments reveal the ‘unseen’ aspect of something we often miss. These tests are necessary for psychologists to reach some conclusions on the ‘confused’ subject matter. Conducted in America after Martin Luther King's assassination, ‘A Class Divided’ is one such thought-provoking study. Due to its popularity, later it was made as a television documentary film. And it is still widely considered as one of the finest psychological study ever created to understand our perception of racism and prejudice.
By
Srini
A Class Divided
Study Conducted By: Jane Elliott
Study Conducted in 1968 in an Iowa classroom
Experiment Details: Jane Elliott’s famous experiment was inspired by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the inspirational life that he led. The third grade teacher developed an exercise to help her Caucasian students understand the effects of racism and prejudice.
Elliott divided her class into two separate groups: blue-eyed students and brown-eyed students. On the first day, she labeled the blue-eyed group as the superior group and from that point forward they had extra privileges, leaving the brown-eyed children to represent the minority group. She discouraged the groups from interacting and singled out individual students to stress the negative characteristics of the children in the minority group. What this exercise showed was that the children’s behavior changed almost instantaneously. The group of blue-eyed students performed better academically and even began bullying their brown-eyed classmates. The brown-eyed group experienced lower self-confidence and worse academic performance. The next day, she reversed the roles of the two groups and the blue-eyed students became the minority group.
At the end of the experiment, the children were so relieved that they were reported to have embraced one another and agreed that people should not be judged based on outward appearances. This exercise has since been repeated many times with similar outcomes.
by
Srini