Elliot had the ideal environment to create the situations for both superior and inferior blue-eyed and brown-eyed children and adults. In the first segment, the children were manipulated to believe the “fact” that the superior groups were better, smarter, and were going to have more privilege’s and access. While both inferior groups were almost immediately assumed to be violent, with worse parents, and not allowed to use the drinking fountain directly -only with a paper cup. The inferior groups were also …show more content…
No matter what they came up with there would be no ladder tall enough to climb from Elliot’s scenario, these are perfect examples of how people in these situations truly have little to no flexibility in social mobility (Keister & Southgate, 2012, p. 21, 202-205). The first example I saw happened as the class was looking for a page to review in class. Elliot was quick to capitalize at an inferior brown-eyed Lauren who could not seem to find the page quick enough, and from this she had deduced for the rest of the class to “take notice how they would spend a great deal of time waiting on the brown-eyed people today.” Another display of discrimination providing a no-win outcome was when Craig threw away his paper cup. He was immediately told to take it back out of the trash and to stop be wasteful as all people in the inferior group are. Elliot did not need look hard to find behaviors for interpretation that could be possible confirmations to her assigned stereotypes. Each day the experiment and Elliot seemed to luck out on things a student in the assigned “inferior” group would do such as the above mentioned not being able to keep up with the rest of the class, as well as when the inferior blue-eyed student forgot his glasses and the better and smarter brown-eyed girl had remembered hers just …show more content…
As far as experiments go, an excellent example of mind over matter. I fully believe when people are discriminated and belittled, they will ultimately have very little reason to perform or produce anything of structural or even passionate production and with good reason. With the distraction of the collar around their necks to constantly remind them of the ill treatment of the day, there is not much concentration left for learning -especially when one is made to feel as if they are not worthy of doing so. Elliot was able to create a low level of class conflict, with high level inequality within her classroom where the ruling class always seemed to have a major upper hand -especially when it came to lunch time (Keister & Southgate, 2012, p.