blue eyes brown eyes experiment ethical issues10 marca 2023
According to the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, 2010 the experiment also violates the principle of Integrity. "I understand this is the first time you've flown?" Keep me from judging a man until I have walked a mile in his moccasins. This is a Sioux saying. Brown-eyed people. The Associated Press followed up, quoting Elliott as saying she was "dumbfounded" by the exercise's effectiveness. She told them brown-eyed . Subsequent research designed to gauge the efficacy of Elliotts attempt at reducing prejudice showed that many participants were shocked by the experiment, but it did nothing to address or explain the root causes of racism. Elliott separated her all-white class of students into two groups: blue-eyed children and brown-eyed children. Why was the Blue Eyes and Brown Eyes Experiment considered unethical in psychology? ", Elliott says the role of a teacher is to enhance students' moral development. 5/21/2020 Topic: Module 2 Discussion: ", We stopped on Woodlawn Avenue, and a woman in her mid-40s approached us on the sidewalk. Not a day goes by without me thinking about it, Ms. Elliott. The blue-eyed brown-eyed experiment was conducted by Jane Elliott, a school teacher from Iowa, in which she separated blue eyed children from brown eyed children and took turns making one of the "superior" to the other. Shermer and Bloom discuss: "Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes" Jane Elliott famous racism experiment reactions to it (in the classroom, locally, nationally, internationally) whether the "experiment" was really more of a demonstration public interest, from Johnny Carson to Oprah Winfrey the questionable ethics of the experiment what it reveals about tribalism, racism . In the documentary, she said that she conducted the original blue-eyes, brown-eyes experiment to make a positive change. ", 2023 Smithsonian Magazine That says very plainly that you know whats happening, you know you dont want it for you. Youve probably heard different versions of it. Yes, the children felt angry, hurt, betrayed. Sadly, these conversations are still relevant today. 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 . she asked the children, who were white. ", Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images, now-famous "blue eyes/brown eyes exercise, 'I See These Conversations As Protective': Talking With Kids About Race. Thats what it feels like when youre discriminated against., -A child participant in the Blue Eyes-Brown Eyes experiment-. She and her husband, Darald Elliott, then a grocer, have four children, and they, too, felt a backlash. The day after Kings murder, Jane Elliott, a white third-grade teacher in rural Riceville, Iowa, sought to make her students feel the brutality of racism. That same year, Elliott was invited to the White House Conference on Children and Youth to conduct an exercise on adult educators. He printed them under the headline "How Discrimination Feels." I think it can. Jane Elliott, a teacher and anti-racism activist, performed a direct experiment with the students in her classroom. The exercise is "an inoculation against racism," she says. The more melanin, the darker the person's eyesand the smarter the person. Stephen G. Bloom does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. Let's just move on. This bibliography was generated on Cite This For Me on Monday, March 7, 2016. But Paul, one of eight siblings and the son of a dairy farmer, didnt buy Elliotts mollification. Privacy Statement 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. 980 Words. When the blue-eyed group saw that the brown-eyed group was going to be seated first, some became upset. In her article, Peggy McIntosh compares the "white privilege" to an invisible set of unearned rewards and . "We give our children shots to inoculate them against polio and smallpox, to protect them against the realities in the future. Jane Elliott is 84 years old, a tiny woman with white hair, wire-rim glasses and little patience. At recess, three brown-eyed girls ganged up on her. Blue-eyed people. "She could get kids to do anything she wanted them to," he says of Elliott. They all either smiled or laughed and nodded.". It is a must . In 1970, a documentary about the exercise was released. "Why?" Some residents were furious. When you read about this experiment, its hard not to question labels. Children with brown eyes were forced to wear armbands that made it easy for people to see that they had brown eyes. In the 60th year beyond Brown vs. Board of Education, Frontline is making available their classic 1985 documentary, " A Class Divided ," about the experiment and what happened later. The children were not aware of the experiment, and therefore they could not give their permission of involvement. Zimbardocreator of the also controversial 1971 Stanford Prisoner Experiment, which was stopped after college student volunteers acting as "guards" humiliated students acting as "prisoners"says Elliott's exercise is "more compelling than many done by professional psychologists. These initial criticisms didnt stop Elliott. Two students even got into a physical altercation. Elliot's approach to the experiment involved creativity in which the pupils' age and ability to comprehend discrimination was taken into account. 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. She and Darald split their time between a converted schoolhouse in Osage, Iowa, a town 18 miles from Riceville, and a home near Riverside, California. According to the article is Jane Elliot's experiment to small degree effective. The experiment known as Blue Eyes Brown Eyes experiment is regarded as an eye-opening way for children to learn about racism and discrimination. In response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, Jane Elliott devised the controversial and startling, "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise." This, now famous, exercise labels participants as inferior or superior based solely upon the color of their eyes and exposes them to the experience of . From the moment the experiment begins, Jane Elliott uses a mean tone to speak to the participants. It also shows how arbitrary and subjective things can turn friends, family members, and citizens against each other. Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. Blue Eyed vs Brown Eyed Study Conducted by Jane Elliott Presentation by Bree Elliott Ethics Background The Results In 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated, Jane Elliott was the teacher of a third grade class in the town of Riceville, Iowa. The secretary on duty looked up, startled, as if she had just seen a ghost. (Byrnes & Kiger, 1992). Elliott began the exercise by dividing her students by eye color. Elliott instructed the blue-eyed kids not to play on the jungle gym or swings. She asked the other teachers what they were doing to bring news of the King assassination into their classrooms. Elliott flew to the NBC studio in New York City. Her class, After the local newspaper published a story on Elliott and the experiment, she was flown to New York to appear on May 31, 1968, on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where she extolled the experiments effectiveness in cluing in her 8-year-old white students on what it was like to be Black in America. A second look at the blue-eyes, brown-eyes experiment that taught third-graders about racism. Jane Elliott at Riceville, Iowa, Elementary School in 1968. . She pointed out flaws in a student and associated it with . The video . The nonstop parade of sickening events such as the murder of George Floyd surely is not going to be abated by a quickie experiment led by a white person for the alleged benefit of other whites as was the case with the blue-eyed, brown eyed experiment. 10," Elliott said. ", Jane shielded her eyes from the morning sun. The kids in the bottom group became timider and kept to themselves. Though Jane's actions were justifiable because she was not a psychologist, her experiment cannot be replicated in the present society. This way, she successfully created two distinct groups in her classroom: The consequences of the minimal group became evident very quickly. one girl asked. Much like the Zimbardo's Stanford Prison experiment where students were divided by either being the jailer or the jailed. "Brown-eyed people have more of that chemical in their eyes, so brown-eyed people are better than those with blue eyes," Elliott said. Jane Elliot and the Blue-Eyed Children Experiment. Yet what Elliott did continues to stir controversy. 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. Looking back, I think part of the problem was that, like the residents of other small midwestern towns I've covered, many in Riceville felt that calling attention to oneself was poor manners, and that Elliott had shone a bright light not just on herself but on Riceville; people all over the United States would think Riceville was full of bigots. "She got carried away by this possession she developed over human beings. However, the study shows some bias in the sample size and race of participants. The first thing that Jane Elliott did was divide the children into groups: those with blue eyes and those with brown eyes. I felt like hitting them if I wanted to. When Elliott first conducted the exercise in 1968, brown-eyed students were given special privileges. Facilitators should be aware that Jane Elliott's focus on white people can lead viewers to the wrong impression that people of color are passively molded by white people's behavior when, in actuality, people of color can and do respond to racism in a variety of ways. The Blue-Eyed/Brown-Eyed Experiment: Investigation. In this article, we'll explain what happened during the experiment and discuss its consequences. She compromised the APA's Code of Conduct and Ethical Standard because she lied, after that she recanted the lies and kept as they were justified because of her greater purpose. Back in the classroom, Elliott's experiment had taken on a life of its own. Jane Elliott (ne Jennison; born on November 30, 1933) is an American diversity educator.As a schoolteacher, she became known for her "Blue eyes/Brown eyes" exercise, which she first conducted with her third-grade class on April 5, 1968, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. 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. At her lunch break that day in the teacher's lounge, she told her colleagues about the exercise. The Brown Eyed / Blue Eyed Experiment. When Elliott conducted the exercise the next year, she added something extra to collect data. 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. But the protests happening now have given her hope. Could you?". Disclaimer: SpeedyPaper.com is a custom writing service that provides online on-demand writing work for assistance purposes. On the second day of the experiment, Elliott switched the childrens roles. Initial Reaction to the Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Exercise. Jane Elliott, one of the most controversial figures in U.S. education and diversity training, began her journey to international acclaim in Riceville, Iowa. Dick DeMarsico/New York World-Telegram & the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection/PhotoQuest/Getty Images, Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images, Committee Member - MNF Research Advisory Committee, PhD Scholarship - Uncle Isaac Brown Indigenous Scholarship. She slumped. The Blue Eye/Brown Eye was an experiment performed by Jane Elliot in 1968 on the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. At first, she cooperated with me. The results showed a reversal effect in which the blue-eyed students showed signs of inferiority and low self-esteem. One student answers, since the day I was born. Throughout the entire experiment, Elliott leads frank conversations about race and discrimination. Elliott continues, "Just when you think that the fertile soil can sprout no more, another season comes round, and you see another year of bountiful crops, tall and straight. Perhaps because the outcome seemed so optimistic and comforting, coverage of Elliott and the experiments alleged curative powers cropped up everywhere. The arbitrary division among the students intensified over the course of the experiment, so much so that it actually ended in physical violence. She chatted about the experiment, and before she knew it was whisked off the stage. She says that its shocking how children whore normally kind, cooperative, and friendly with each other suddenly become arrogant, discriminatory, and hostile when they belong to a superior group. "It changed my life. The brown-eyed children began to act aggressive and mean towards the blue-eyed children. . Kids on top would tease the children who were deemed as the inferior group. All rights reserved. Malinda Whisenhunt? Before she could answer, another boy piped up: "If she didn't have blue eyes, she'd be the principal or the superintendent.". Back when she introduced the experiment to her Iowa students more than five decades ago, at least one student had the audacity to challenge Elliotts premise, according to those who were in the classroom at the time. All 28 children found their desks, and Elliott said she had something special for them to do, to begin to understand the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. the day before. "There's a sense of renewal here that I've never seen anywhere else," Elliott says. On April 4 1968, King was killed by the single . "I think third grade was too young for what she did. Elliott is nothing if not stubborn. Below, . Today, she says, it's still playing out as the U.S. reckons with racial injustice. The people of riceville did not exactly welcome Elliott home from New York with a hayride. Sorry, but it's not possible to copy the text due to security reasons. The story was then picked up by the Associated Press. The tallest structure in Riceville is the water tower. The textbook publisher McGraw-Hill has listed her on a timeline of key educators, along with Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Horace Mann, Booker T. Washington, Maria Montessori and 23 others. Jane Elliott on The Tonight Show on May 31, 1968. ", "I've never forgotten the exercise," Whisenhunt volunteered. She told them that people with brown eyes were better than people with blue eyes. "We are repeating the blue-eyed/brown-eyed exercise on a daily basis.". That got the other teachers angry. Right off the bat, she picked me out of the room and called me Barbie, Pasicznyk told me. In a grassy front yard down the block is a hand-lettered sign: "Glads for Sale, 3 for $1." Throughout the investigation, the classroom represented a real-life scenario in which the unprivileged and minority members of the society are treated as out-groups making them susceptible to discrimination. ", A chorus of "Yeahs" went up, and so began one of the most astonishing exercises ever conducted in an American classroom. The roots of racism and why it continues unabated in America and other nations are complicated and gnarled. The second day, Elliott reversed the groups. In 2001, she was still trying to make a change. What Lies Behind Your Urgent Need to Answer Work E Mails? Grey eyes are also a rare eye color. The test also included violation of consent in which participation of the children was made involuntarily. In the 60s, the United States was in the midst of a social race crisis. 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. Introduction. ", When I met Elliott in 2003, she hadn't been back to Riceville in 12 years. Retrieved from https://speedypaper.com/essays/ethical-concerns-in-jane-elliots-experiment, Free essays can be submitted by anyone, so we do not vouch for their quality. The 1970s and 1980s were ripe for diversity education in the private and public sectors, and Elliott would try out the experiment at workshops on tens of thousands of participants, not just in the U.S. and Canada, but in Europe, the Middle East and Australia. Charity is humiliating because its exercised vertically and from above; solidarity is horizontal and implies mutual respect.. Elliott split her students into two groups, based on eye color. The brown-eyed students also exercised a certain level of power over the blue-eyed students when they put the armbands on them. While Jane Elliot's experiment makes several assumptions, it also has some ethical concerns. Stripping away the veneer of the experiment, what was left had nothing to do with race. . Blue Eye/Brown Eye is an experiment performed by Jane Elliot in 1968 on the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated to demonstrate what prejudice was to her third grade class. 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. Abstract The effectiveness of a well-known prejudice-reduction simulation, "Blue Eyes-Brown Eyes," was assessed as a tool for changing the attitudes of ncnblack teacher eduction students toward blacks. Although actions from the experiment show lack of respect towards subjects it has widely been recognized in the study of human behavior in social and cultural context. "Do blue-eyed people remember what they've been taught?" "Blue-eyed people sit around and do nothing. This was the smaller group. Normally, blue-eyes isnt an insult. Then tell them that . More than 50 years after her famous exercise, Elliott is still fighting. Is your time best spent reading someone elses essay? On the first day, the blue-eyed students were informed that they were genetically inferior to the brown-eyed students. She has since refused to answer any of my inquiries. 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. Days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., she pioneered an experiment to show her all-white class of third graders what it was like to be Black in America. Elliot said that when the children were given the test on the same day that they were in the superior group, they tended to get the highest scores. ", Dean Weaver, 70, superintendent of Riceville schools from 1972 to 1979, said, "She'd just go ahead and do things. 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. "They can't forget me," she said, "and because of who they are, they can't forgive me. SpeedyPaper website, please click below to request its removal: Liked this essay sample but need an original one? At the time, she was a third-grade . She could feel a chasm forming between the two groups of students. This technique allows researchers to show how many different traits are necessary to create defined groups, and then analyze the subjects behavior within their groups. It is sometimes cited as a landmark of social science. Jane Elliot's 'The Blue Eyes and Brown Eyes Experiment' was unethical in that she created a segregated environment in a third grade classroom. In this scenario, students are told brown-eyed people . The brown-eyed children felt suddenly that they were discriminated, while the blue eyed started seeing them as inferior. Elliott reminded them that the reason for the lesson was the King assassination, and she asked them to write down what they had learned. The selection was based on the color of the eye for each group. She appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show five times. They killed hundreds of thousands of people based on eye color alone, thats the reason I used eye color for my determining factor that day., Elliott divided the class into children with blue eyes and children with brown eyes. "They are cleaner and they are smarter.". Elliott started to see her own white privilege, even her own ignorance. Theyd have to use paper cups if they drank from the water fountain. On the morning of april 5, 1968, a Friday, Steven Armstrong stepped into Jane Elliott's third-grade classroom in Riceville, Iowa. 4 Pages. ", Absolutely not. "Hey, Mrs. Elliott," Steven yelled as he slung his books on his desk. The musical is about romance, but it integrates issues of race and discrimination (Norris, 2014), and the song is about how discrimination is taught carefully, in long term. Her bold experiment to teach Iowa third graders about racial prejudice divided townspeople and thrust her onto the national stage. She then made the blue-eyed students believe that they were better and smarter than their counterparts. Elliott's friends and family say she's tenacious, and has always had a reformer's zeal. The hate and discrimination that we see in adults have their origin in their upbringing. Jane Elliott's brown eye/blue eye experiment starts at 03:10 of A Class Divided. In a similar vein, Linda Seebach, a conservative columnist for the Rocky Mountain News, wrote in 2004 that Elliott was a "disgrace" and described her exercise as "sadistic," adding, "You would think that any normal person would realize that she had done an evil thing. Decent Essays. Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes 1968 - Jane Elliot, grade school teacher in Iowa conducted a classroom experiment to test whether racism was a learned characteristic Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes - an experiment to "create racism" Jane Elliot divided her 4th grade class into two groups based on eye color The Brown eyed group were told they were superior due . . Kors writes that Elliott's exercise taught "blood-guilt and self-contempt to whites," adding that "in her view, nothing has changed in America since the collapse of Reconstruction." We have to let people find out how it feels to be on the receiving end of that which we dish out so readily.". "The racists carry on, so I carry on." The lives and legacies of Dr. Jane Elliott and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are inextricably linked. PracticalPie.com is a participant in the Amazon Associates Program. The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise received national attention shortly after it ended. Researchers later concluded that there was evidence that the students became less prejudiced after the study and that it was inconclusive as to whether or not the potential harm outweighed the benefits of the exercise. Copyright 20102023, The Conversation Media Group Ltd. One even wrote a lipstick message with racial slurs. It is quite powerful to watch. Their response is to create dichotomies of inferiority and superiority. 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. 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. Articles and opinions on happiness, fear and other aspects of human psychology. 2012 2023 . All the work should be used in accordance with the appropriate policies and applicable laws. Biddle, B. J. And what she did caused an uproar. In this article, we talk about leadership and female discrimination.. Many critics that the children were too young to understand the exercise. Considering all the stereotypes and prejudices that exist, what kind of damage is being done? This was intentional. She gave the blue-eyed students an armband so other students could more easily identify them, and then she told her class that it was a scientific fact that people with brown eyes are smarter than those with blue because their bodies had more . If you have ever heard of the self-fulfilling prophecy, these results may not come as a surprise. One of the main ones was the fact that their right to withdraw was taken away from them. Delivery in 6+ hours! . She was hesitant to enroll in Elliotts workshop but was told that if she wanted to succeed as a manager, shed have to attend. Two years later, a BBC documentary captured the experiment in Elliott's classroom. Jane Elliott was a third grade teacher in Riceville, Iowa when she developed the Blue Eyed/ Brown Eyed exercise to teach the effects of racism. Watch it online right now! "You better apologize to us for getting in our way because we're better than you are," one of the brownies said. Even though the response to the Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise was initially negative, it made Jane Elliott a leading figure in diversity training. She was a standing-room-only speaker at hundreds of colleges and universities. The first day of the experiment she convinced the children that blue-eyed people were smarter, better and would have more priorities. It's the Jane Elliott machine. The "invisible knapsack" is an analogy for a set of invisible and not widely talked about privileges that white people possess in the society. "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. She knew that the children weren't going to buy her pitch unless she came up with a reason, and the more scientific to these Space Age children of the 1960s, the better. Students in the inferior groups were more likely to get a worse score. It brings up immediate anger and hatred. Was The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Experiment Ethical? "If this ugly change, if this negative change can happen this quickly, why can't positive change happen that quickly? "I don't think this community was ready for what she did," he said. Jane Elliot, a third-grade teacher from Lowa town, became troubled with the turn of events and knew that something had to be done about racial discrimination (Danko, 2013). Even though some of the children said yes, Elliott pushed back. This paradigm helps understand the current problems related to discrimination. She has spoken at more than 350 colleges and universities. Children often fight, argue, and sometimes hit each other, but this time they were motivated by eye color. "It's happening every day in this country, right now," she said in an interview with Morning Edition. As a school teacher in the small town of Riceville, Iowa, Elliott first conducted the anti-racism experiment on her all-white third-grade classroom, the day after the civil rights leader was killed. Kellen Castineiras PSY Dr. Gail C. Flanagan February 6, 2022. . In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Elliott developed a simple exercise that explored the nature of racism and prejudice.. Elliott's method for exploring racism in the context of an all-white classroom consisted of dividing her students into two groups on the basis of eye color, blue or brown (those with other eye colors were assigned to the group . As Elliott recalls, she engineered the "blue eyes/brown eyes exercise" in 1968 after watching the late-night news cycle announce the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Rather than be deterred by possible The idea was simple but profound. There are risks to those inoculations, too, but we determine that those risks are worth taking. "Maybe the way to sell the exercise would have been to invite the parents in, to talk about what she'd be doing. If this arbitrary division that Elliott enforced for a few hours created so many problems in this classroom, whats happening on a larger scale? The same experiment was also used a couple of years later with adults. "Your son got what he deserved," the woman said. She told the kids that blue-eyed children weren't as good as brown-eyed or green-eyed ones. She split the class in two categories, according to eye color, and told the children that one group was superior to the others. Mental Sandboxes and Their Usefulness in Today's World, The Law of Reversed Effort: When Taking Action Isn't the Best Option. She told them that people with brown eyes were superior to those with blue eyes, for reasons she made up. hide caption. A columnist at a Denver newspaper called it "evil. "That you, Ms. Website. On Friday, April 5, 1968, in Riceville, IA, a third-grade student walked . The documentary has become a popular teaching tool among teachers, business owners, and even employees at correctional facilities. And the exercise continued in a similar fashion to how it was executed the day before.