Psychology Report: Exploring the Blue Eye Experiment and Racism

This report provides an in-depth analysis of the Blue Eye Experiment, a social experiment conducted by Jane Elliott to demonstrate the effects of racial prejudice. The experiment involved dividing a class of third-grade students into groups based on their eye color, assigning them superior or infe...Read More

Assignment on Blue Eye Experiment.
Name of the student
Roll number
Date of submission

Racial prejudice is used to justify one group to be subordinate to another group. People
are differentiated base don lower and upper social class. The racial prejudice is in fact hostility of
one race that is generally superior toward the people of another race or culture. This dominance
is used to keep the position of status and power in place. In early years or even today this
approach is maintained by less-affluent White labor class to minimize competition from
upwardly immigrant minorities. In the blue eye experiment this concept of racism is been
experimented. Jane Elliott who was born on May 27, 1933 was a former American third-grade
schoolteacher. She was a strict anti-racism activist, she believed in humanity and unity. She
conducted the famous blue eyed exercise in her class on April 5, 1968, just a day after Martin
Luther King Jr. was assassinated (Hagendoorn, 2018). Next when this experiment proved to be a
turning stone in humanity psychology it was filmed third time on 1970 in the third-graders with
her. And it was named as “The Eye of the Storm”.
The experiment was done with third grade students where she conducted the experiment
with eye color and not skin color the experiment was done to make the children understand what
the impact of racial segregation is on them. On the first day she divided the class into blue eyed
and brown eyed group. The student who was blue eyed was the superior group. She asked them
to tie brown fabric collars around the necks of brown-eyed peers. These were called the minority
group. The blue-eyed children were given extra privileges in all activities. The superior group
were asked to sit in the front row were as the brown eyed were asked to take the back seat. The
blue eyed were asked to play only with blue eyed peers and she often chastised the brown-eyed
students when they did not follow. She would use negative aspects of brown-eyed children to
belittle them.
The experiment proved to be milestone is defining the negative impact of racism
prejudice. Initially student of brown eye did showed resistance but when they were given false
theory to believe their strength started to fall. The "superior" showed sign of arrogance, and
unpleasant attitude towards the "inferior" classmates. The grades of superior mates started to
improve. On the other hand the "inferior" classmates became more timid and subservient. They

were scoring poorly on tests even those who use to be a good student. After a week the cycle was
changed and the blue eyed were now inferior group. The brown-eyed children started to show the
arrogance and taunted the blue-eyed children in same way they did to them. The whole
experiment was explained how discrimination felt. What is racism and the worst of impacts that
so many of the black, brown, yellow or Hispanic race of people go through while living in
another country. Everyone is of human race and there are more similarities than difference
between human of one continent to another. The social message given by this experiment was
clear that a person being treated inferiorly based on skin color or language spoken or culture
followed is psychologically disturbing and makes the person suffer mentally (Rattansi, 2020).
There is one similar instance when my friend from another country came to study here with me
and for first 3 months he faced similar discrimination from his peers.

Reference
Hagendoorn, L. (2018). Introduction: a model of the effects of education on prejudice and
racism. In Education and Racism (pp. 1-20). Routledge.
Rattansi, A. (2020). Racism: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.