Two Important Psychological Experiments: The Blue Eye/Brown Eye and Stanford Prison

The Blue Eye/Brown Eye was an experiment performed by Jane Elliot in 1968 on the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Its goal was to demonstrate what prejudice was to her third grade class. The basic idea was to separate the class into two halves, students with blue eyes and those with brown.

Elliot told her students that children with blue eyes were inherently inferior to the children with brown eyes. As a result, they were denied access to play equipment. Children with blue eyes were told they were stupid, and they were not allowed to socialize with members of the 'superior group'. The next day the roles were reversed, with the blue-eyed children were told that they were actually the superior in every way to students with brown eyes.

The idea behind the experiment was to show the children first hand what prejudice was like. The experiment was a success. On days when students were part of the so-called inferior group, they had lower test scores, showed less enthusiasm, and displayed more hostility towards activities in the classroom. This particular experiment has since been repeated with similar, dramatic results elsewhere. The design of the experiment has raised serious ethical questions surrounding the idea of "informed consent." Critics suggest that Jane Elliott was not qualified to perform this type of experiment and that she did not consider the long-term consequences of this study on her students. The design of the experiment was such th

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Category: Psychology - T