Jane Elliott's A Class Divided

The experiment “A Class Divided” was performed in order to prove that prejudice and stereotypes can influence a “superior” group’s opinion on an “inferior” group, and in this specific experiment, the discrimination was based on two different eye colors of a group of elementary school students. And sadly, the outcome verified the hypothesis, as the experimenter Jane Elliott witnessed a group of “marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turned to nasty, vicious, discriminating third-graders.”
On the first day of the experiment, Jane Elliott first set up the discrimination between blue-eyed superior and brown-eyed inferior. And by which she meant that the blue-eyed get extra recess, can drink water directly from the water fountain, can have seconds at lunch and can play anytime on the playground equipment; while the brown-eyed must only use a paper cup to drink from the fountain, may not play with blue-eyed children and must stay off the playground equipments. She then reinforced the difference by putting a collar on the brown-eye children so that their identities could be easily distinguished. But on the second day, the blue-eyed and brown-eyed switched roles in the social hierarchy.
Stereotypes were established immediately. The blue-eyed students quickly began to form hostility against the brown-eyed students and the brown-eyed students immediately associate themselves with low self-worth, as they started to resonate with the stereotypes, which lead to psychological …show more content…
This study could be problematic because although children’s behaviors could more accurately reflect the natural instinct of human beings because they were more likely to lack the ability to distinguish the reality from virtual experiment critically, therefore the experience could unconsciously disturb them from forming a proper moral