prejudice experiment

Blue Eyes Brown Eyes – Jane Elliott

“Keep me from judging a man until I have walked a mile in his moccasins.” This is a Sioux saying. You’ve probably heard different versions of it. This is the phrase that inspired one of the most well-known “experiments” in education. The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise is now known as the inspiration for diversity training in the workplace, making Jane Elliott one of the most influential educators in recent American history.

What Was The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Experiment?

In 1968, schoolteacher Jane Elliott decided to divide her classroom into students with blue eyes and students with brown eyes. The experiment, known as Blue Eyes Brown Eyes experiment, is regarded as an eye-opening way for children to learn about racism and discrimination.

What Was the Purpose of the Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Experiment?

The day after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, Elliott had a talk with her students about diversity and racism. She asked her students, who were all white, whether or not they knew what it felt like to be judged by the color of their skin. Even though some of the children said yes, Elliott pushed back. She asked them if they would like to experience what it felt like to be in a person of color’s shoes. The children said yes, and the exercise began.

Why Did Jane Elliott Choose Eye Color To Divide Her Students?

The first thing that Jane Elliott did was divide the children into groups: those with blue eyes and those with brown eyes. This was intentional. “One of the ways Hitler decided who went into the gas chamber was eye color,” Elliott said in a later speech. “If you had a good German name, but you had brown eyes, they threw you into the gas chamber because they thought you might be a Jewish person who was trying to pass. They killed hundreds of thousands of people based on eye color alone, that’s the reason I used eye color for my determining factor that day.”

How Did The Experiment Work?

Elliott divided the class into children with blue eyes and children with brown eyes. On the first day, she told the children with blue eyes they were “superior": smarter and more well-behaved than the children with brown eyes. Children with brown eyes were forced to wear armbands that made it easy for people to see that they had brown eyes. (In later versions of the exercise, children in the “inferior” group were given collars to wear.)

Throughout the day, Elliott continued to give the children with blue eyes special treatment. Blue-eyed children got five extra minutes of recess. If brown-eyed children made a mistake, Elliott would call out the mistake and attribute it to the student’s brown eyes.

The next day, Elliott reversed the roles. The brown-eyed children could take off their armbands and give them to the blue-eyed children, who were now taught that they were “inferior” to the brown-eyed children. And the exercise continued in a similar fashion to how it was executed the day before.

Results of the Experiment

It didn’t take long for the children to turn on each other. Kids “on top” would tease the children who were deemed as the inferior group. The kids in the “bottom” group became timider and kept to themselves. Things even got violent at recess. Within a few hours of starting the exercise, Elliott noticed big differences in the children’s behavior and how they treated each other. She noticed that student relationships had changed; even if students were friendly outside of the exercise, they treated each other with arrogance or bossiness once the “roles” were assigned.

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.

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. Students in the “inferior” groups were more likely to get a worse score. If you have ever heard of the self-fulfilling prophecy , these results may not come as a surprise.

Initial Reaction to the Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Exercise

Why are we still talking about this experiment over 50 years later?

The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise received national attention shortly after it ended. Elliott asked her students to write about their experiences for the local newspaper. The story was then picked up by the Associated Press. Elliott was even brought on The Tonight Show to talk about her experiences.

Not everyone appreciated Elliott’s exercise. In fact, most of the initial response was negative. Elliott’s coworkers avoided her after her appearance on The Tonight Show. They gossiped about her in the hallway. One even wrote a lipstick message with racial slurs.

Was The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Experiment Ethical?

Many critics that the children were too young to understand the exercise. One caller complained that white children would not be able to handle the exercise and would be seriously damaged by the exercise.

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.

These initial criticisms didn’t stop Elliott. She continued to conduct the exercise with her third graders. In 1970, a documentary about the exercise was released. Watch it online right now ! The documentary has become a popular teaching tool among teachers, business owners, and even employees at correctional facilities.

That same year, Elliott was invited to the White House Conference on Children and Youth to conduct an exercise on adult educators.

Lasting Impact of Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Experiment

Fourteen years later, the students featured in The Eye of the Storm reunited and discussed their experiences with Elliott. Many of them noted that when they hear prejudice and discrimination from others, they “wish they could whip out those collars” and give them the experience they had as third graders. This meeting, along with other clips of the exercise’s impact on education, is featured in a PBS documentary called A Class Divided. 

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 left teaching in the mid-80s to speak publicly about the experience and the impact of prejudice and racism.

Anti-Racism Training in the 21st Century

In 2001, Jane Elliott recorded  The Angry Eye,  in which she revised and updated her experiment. This time, the participants weren't a bunch of elementary school children - they were young adults. From the moment the experiment begins, Jane Elliott uses a mean tone to speak to the participants. She says it's because racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, and ethnocentrism are mean and nasty.

The blue-eyed participants faced discrimination for two and a half hours. In explaining the experiment rules to the brown-eyed contestants, she addresses the people of color in the room. She asks them if they have ever faced treatment like the type that blue-eyed people would experience in the following two and a half hours. One student answers, "since the day I was born." Throughout the entire experiment, Elliott leads frank conversations about race and discrimination. Sadly, these conversations are still relevant today. They were also relevant in the 1950s when Elliott first began this work.

In the documentary, she said that she conducted the original blue-eyes, brown-eyes experiment to make a positive change. In 2001, she was still trying to make a change. You can contribute to that positive change by watching the documentary . It is quite powerful to watch. At points, you are likely to feel uncomfortable. In the most uncomfortable moments, Elliott reminds the students of violent acts caused by racism or homophobia.

Jane Elliot Quotes 

Jane Elliot’s work and experiences have made her an authority on education and anti-racism. The following are some of her most insightful quotes on these issues. 

On the Power of Words

“ Words are the most powerful weapon devised by humankind. We use them to divide and destroy people.”

On White Privilege

“ White people’s number one freedom , in the United States of America, is the freedom to be totally ignorant of those who are other than white. We don’t have to learn about those who are other than white. And our number two freedom is the freedom to deny that we’re ignorant.”

On Understanding The Different Ways We Treat Other Races

“ I want every white person in this room who would be happy to be treated as this society in general treats our citizens, our black citizens, if you, as a white person, would be happy to receive the same treatment that our black citizens do in this society, please stand. You didn’t understand the directions. If you white folks want to be treated the way blacks are in this society, stand. Nobody’s standing here. That says very plainly that you know what’s happening, you know you don’t want it for you. I want to know why you’re so willing to accept it or to allow it to happen for others.” 

On Conversations With Other Teachers

" The first reaction I get from teachers , who see this film or from hearing, - hear me discuss what I do say to me "How can you do that to these little children? How can put those little children through that exercise for a day?" And they seem unable to relate the sympathy that they're feeling for these little white children for a day to what happens to children of color in this society for a lifetime or to the fact that they are doing this to children based on skin color every day. And I'm 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."

On The Origins of Racism

“We learn to be racist, therefore we can learn not to be racist. Racism is not genetical. It has everything to do with power."

Where Is Jane Elliott Now?

To this day, at the age of 86, Jane Elliott continues this work. She has made statements about the increase in hate crimes and racism in recent years. The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise continues to be relevant. The idea of white privilege is closely tied to Elliott’s initial question to her students. Did they know what it was like to be discriminated against?

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 . The students initially involved wished that everyone could participate in an exercise like this. How do you think the world would change if everyone experienced the perils and setbacks that come with prejudice and discrimination?

Related posts:

• Outgroup Bias (Definition + Examples)
• Discrimination Stimulus
• Superior and Inferior Colliculi
• Stanley Milgram (Psychologist Biography)
• Philip Zimbardo (Biography + Experiments)

Reference this article:

About The Author

PracticalPie.com is a participant in the Amazon Associates Program. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Follow Us On:

Youtube Facebook Instagram X/Twitter

Psychology Resources

Developmental

Personality

Relationships

Psychologists

Serial Killers

Psychology Tests

Personality Quiz

Memory Test

Depression test

Type A/B Personality Test

© PracticalPsychology. All rights reserved

Privacy Policy | Terms of Use

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Updates: The Fight Against Racial Injustice

America reckons with racial injustice, we are repeating the discrimination experiment every day, says educator jane elliott.

Rachel Martin

Simone Popperl

Avery Keatley

Emma Bowman

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. Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images hide caption

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.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 prompted educator Jane Elliott to create the now-famous "blue eyes/brown eyes exercise ."

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.

She wanted them to understand what discrimination felt like. Elliott split her students into two groups, based on eye color. She told them that people with brown eyes were superior to those with blue eyes, for reasons she made up. Brown-eyed people, she told the students, are smarter, more civilized and better than blue-eyed people.

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. The May 25 killing of George Floyd set off weeks of nationwide protests over the police abuse and racism against black people, plunging the U.S. into a reckoning of racial inequality.

"It's happening every day in this country, right now," she said in an interview with Morning Edition . "We are repeating the blue-eyed/brown-eyed exercise on a daily basis."

When Elliott first conducted the exercise in 1968, brown-eyed students were given special privileges. She said she watched and was horrified at what she saw.

The students started to internalize, and accept, the characteristics they'd been arbitrarily assigned based on the color of their eyes.

Code Switch

Dispatches from the schoolyard.

'I See These Conversations As Protective': Talking With Kids About Race

Elliott started to see her own white privilege, even her own ignorance. At her lunch break that day in the teacher's lounge, she told her colleagues about the exercise. One teacher ended up displaying the same bigotry Elliott had spent the morning trying to fight.

"She said, on the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, 'I don't know why you're doing that — I thought it was about time somebody shot that son of a bitch,' " she said. "Not one of them reprimanded her for that or even corrected her. They all either smiled or laughed and nodded."

The interaction only strengthened Elliott's resolve. She decided to continue the exercise with her students after lunch.

"No person of any age [was] going to leave my presence with those attitudes unchallenged," Elliott said.

Two years later, a BBC documentary captured the experiment in Elliott's classroom. The demonstration has since been taught by generations of teachers to millions of kids across the country.

Still, Elliott said the last few years have brought out America's worst racist tendencies. The empathy she works to inspire in students with the experiment, which has been modified over the years, is necessary, she said.

"People of other color groups seem to understand," she said. "Probably because they have been taught how they're treated in this country — that they have to understand us. [White people] on the other hand, don't have to understand them. We have to let people find out how it feels to be on the receiving end of that which we dish out so readily."

But the protests happening now have given her hope.

"Things are changing, and they're going to change rapidly if we're very, very fortunate," she said. "If this ugly change, if this negative change can happen this quickly, why can't positive change happen that quickly? I think it can."

• Martin Luther King Jr
• racial justice

A second look at the blue-eyes , brown-eyes experiment that taught third-graders about racism

Professor of Journalism, University of Iowa

Disclosure statement

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.

University of Iowa provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.

View all partners

The killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, was a seismic event , a turning point that compelled many Americans to do something and do it with urgency. Many educators responded by holding mandatory workshops on institutional racism and implicit bias , reforming teaching methods and lesson plans and searching for ways to amplify undersung voices.

As a journalism professor and author of a book on race that spans more than 50 years, I’ve watched these developments with great concern. We’ve been here before, with unsettling and disturbing results.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 was also an event that spurred educators to action, motivating one teacher to try out a bold experiment touted to reduce racism.

The experiment took the nation by storm.

The day after King’s murder, Jane Elliott , a white third-grade teacher in rural Riceville, Iowa, sought to make her students feel the brutality of racism. Elliott separated her all-white class of students into two groups : blue-eyed children and brown-eyed children.

On the first day, the blue-eyed students were informed that they were genetically inferior to the brown-eyed students. Elliott instructed the blue-eyed kids not to play on the jungle gym or swings. They wouldn’t be allowed second helpings for lunch. They’d have to use paper cups if they drank from the water fountain.

The blue-eyed children were told not to do their homework because, even if they answered all the questions, they’d probably forget to bring the assignment back to class. That’s just the way blue-eyed kids were, Elliott told the students.

On the second day of the experiment, Elliott switched the children’s roles.

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 experiment’s effectiveness in cluing in her 8-year-old white students on what it was like to be Black in America.

A darker side

But Elliott’s experiment had a more sinister impact. To most people, it seemed to suggest that racism could be reduced, even eliminated, by a one- or two-day exercise. 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. They needed not acknowledge their privilege or reflect on it. They didn’t need to engage with a single Black person.

But in reality, I found in researching for my book “Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes” that the experiment was a sadistic exhibition of power and authority – levers controlled by Elliott. Stripping away the veneer of the experiment, what was left had nothing to do with race.

It was about cruelty and shaming.

Subsequent research designed to gauge the efficacy of Elliott’s 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 .

The roots of racism – and why it continues unabated in America and other nations – are complicated and gnarled. They are steeped in centuries of economic deprivation and cultural appropriation . 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.

Sought-after diversity trainer

Nevertheless, Elliott became as famous as a teacher could become in America.

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. She traveled to corporations, banks, prisons, schools and military bases.

Thousands of educators across the United States folded the experiment into their curriculums. She was a standing-room-only speaker at hundreds of colleges and universities.

She appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” five times.

Unsettling insults

Elliott turned into America’s mother of diversity training .

The anti-racism sessions Elliott led were intense. To get her points across, Elliott hurled insults at workshop participants, particularly those who were white and had blue eyes. For many, the experiment went horribly awry.

In doing the research for my book with scores of peoples who were participants in the experiment, I reached out to Elliott. At first, she cooperated with me. But when she discovered that I was asking pointed questions of scores of her former students, as well as others subjected to the experiment, she made an about-face and said she no longer would cooperate with me. She has since refused to answer any of my inquiries.

Scores of others did participate. I interviewed Julie Pasicznyk, who had been working for US West, a giant telecommunications company in Minneapolis. She was hesitant to enroll in Elliott’s workshop but was told that if she wanted to succeed as a manager, she’d have to attend. Pasicznyk joined 75 other employees for a training session in the company’s suburban Denver headquarters in the late 1980s.

“Right off the bat, she picked me out of the room and called me ‘Barbie,’” Pasicznyk told me. “That’s how it started, and that’s how it went all day long. She had never met me, and she accused me in front of everyone of using my sexuality to get ahead.”

“Barbie” had to have a Ken, so Elliott picked from the audience a tall, handsome man and accused him of doing the same things with his female subordinates, Pasicznyk said. Elliott went after “Ken” and “Barbie” all day long, drilling, accusing, ridiculing them, to make the point that whites make baseless judgments about Blacks all the time, Pasicznyk said.

Elliott championed the experiment as an “inoculation against racism.”

[ The Conversation’s Politics + Society editors pick need-to-know stories. Sign up for Politics Weekly .]

Questioning authority

The mainstream media were complicit in advancing such a simplistic narrative. They embraced the experiment’s reductive message, as well as its promised potential, thereby keeping the implausible rationale of Elliott’s crusade alive and well for decades, however flawed and racist it really was.

Perhaps because the outcome seemed so optimistic and comforting, coverage of Elliott and the experiment’s alleged curative powers cropped up everywhere. Elliott was featured on nearly every national news show in America for decades.

Elliott’s bullying rejoinder to any nonbeliever was to say that however much pain a white person felt after one or two days of made-up discrimination was nothing when compared to what Blacks endure daily.

Back when she introduced the experiment to her Iowa students more than five decades ago, at least one student had the audacity to challenge Elliott’s premise, according to those who were in the classroom at the time.

When she separated the class by eye color and announced that blue-eyed children were superior, Paul Bodensteiner objected at every turn.

“It’s not true!” he challenged.

Undeterred, Elliott tried to appeal to Paul’s self-interest. “You should be happy! You have the right color eyes!”

But Paul, one of eight siblings and the son of a dairy farmer, didn’t buy Elliott’s mollification. “It’s not true and it’s not fair no matter what you say!” he responded.

I often think about Paul Bodensteiner. How can we teach kids to be more like him? Is it even possible today?

• Diversity training
• Anti-racism
• Civil rights era

Service Centre Senior Consultant

Director of STEM

Community member - Training Delivery and Development Committee (Volunteer part-time)

Chief Executive Officer

Head of Evidence to Action

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

In her words

A Teacher Held a Famous Racism Exercise in 1968. She’s Still at It.

The day after Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Jane Elliott carried out the “Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes” exercise in her classroom. Now, people are returning to her work.

By Alisha Haridasani Gupta

“It makes me really angry that I’ve been saying these things for 52 years.”

— Jane Elliott, a schoolteacher turned anti-racism educator

[In Her Words is available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox .]

As protests against racism started sweeping across America and rest of the world, clips of Jane Elliott , a schoolteacher turned anti-racism educator, began circulating on social media.

Perhaps you’ve seen them.

In one grainy clip from 2001 , Ms. Elliott, with her signature round glasses and clipped white hair, gets into such a heated argument with a white female college student during an educational exercise about racism that the uncomfortable and distraught woman starts crying and storms out of the classroom.

“You just exercised a freedom that none of these people of color have,” Ms. Elliott tells the student, sternly. “When these people of color get tired of racism, they can’t just walk out.”

Or maybe you’ve seen the 2018 video of Ms. Elliott in a round-table discussion on racism with the actress and producer Jada Pinkett Smith, Ms. Pinkett Smith’s daughter, Willow, and Ms. Pinkett Smith’s mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris .

“I’m not a white woman. I’m a faded Black person,” Ms. Elliott says, stunning the hosts. “My people moved far from the Equator, and that’s the only reason my skin is lighter.”

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

Lesson of a Lifetime

Her bold experiment to teach Iowa third graders about racial prejudice divided townspeople and thrust her onto the national stage

Stephen G. Bloom

On the morning of april 5, 1968, a Friday, Steven Armstrong stepped into Jane Elliott's third-grade classroom in Riceville, Iowa. "Hey, Mrs. Elliott," Steven yelled as he slung his books on his desk.

"They shot that King yesterday. Why'd they shoot that King?" 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. "How do you think it would feel to be a Negro boy or girl?" she asked the children, who were white. "It would be hard to know, wouldn't it, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves. Would you like to find out?"

A chorus of "Yeahs" went up, and so began one of the most astonishing exercises ever conducted in an American classroom. Now, almost four decades later, Elliott's experiment still matters—to the grown children with whom she experimented, to the people of Riceville, population 840, who all but ran her out of town, and to thousands of people around the world who have also participated in an exercise based on the experiment. (She prefers the term "exercise.") It is sometimes cited as a landmark of social science. 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. Yet what Elliott did continues to stir controversy. One scholar asserts that it is "Orwellian" and teaches whites "self-contempt." A columnist at a Denver newspaper called it "evil."

That spring morning 37 years ago, the blue-eyed children were set apart from the children with brown or green eyes. Elliott pulled out green construction paper armbands and asked each of the blue-eyed kids to wear one. "The browneyed people are the better people in this room," Elliott began. "They are cleaner and they are smarter."

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. "Eye color, hair color and skin color are caused by a chemical," Elliott went on, writing MELANIN on the blackboard. Melanin, she said, is what causes intelligence. The more melanin, the darker the person's eyes—and the smarter the person. "Brown-eyed people have more of that chemical in their eyes, so brown-eyed people are better than those with blue eyes," Elliott said. "Blue-eyed people sit around and do nothing. You give them something nice and they just wreck it." She could feel a chasm forming between the two groups of students.

"Do blue-eyed people remember what they've been taught?" Elliott asked.

"No!" the brown-eyed kids said.

Elliott rattled off the rules for the day, saying blue-eyed kids had to use paper cups if they drank from the water fountain. "Why?" one girl asked.

"Because we might catch something," a brown-eyed boy said. Everyone looked at Mrs. Elliott. She nodded. As the morning wore on, brown-eyed kids berated their blue-eyed classmates. "Well, what do you expect from him, Mrs. Elliott," a brown-eyed student said as a blue-eyed student got an arithmetic problem wrong. "He's a bluey!"

Then, the inevitable: "Hey, Mrs. Elliott, how come you're the teacher if you've got blue eyes?" a brown-eyed boy asked. Before she could answer, another boy piped up: "If she didn't have blue eyes, she'd be the principal or the superintendent."

At lunchtime, Elliott hurried to the teachers' lounge. She described to her colleagues what she'd done, remarking how several of her slower kids with brown eyes had transformed themselves into confident leaders of the class. Withdrawn brown-eyed kids were suddenly outgoing, some beaming with the widest smiles she had ever seen on them. She asked the other teachers what they were doing to bring news of the King assassination into their classrooms. The answer, in a word, was nothing.

Back in the classroom, Elliott's experiment had taken on a life of its own. A smart blue-eyed girl who had never had problems with multiplication tables started making mistakes. She slumped. At recess, three brown-eyed girls ganged up on her. "You better apologize to us for getting in our way because we're better than you are," one of the brownies said. The blue-eyed girl apologized.

On Monday, Elliott reversed the exercise, and the brown-eyed kids were told how shifty, dumb and lazy they were . Later, it would occur to Elliott that the blueys were much less nasty than the brown-eyed kids had been, perhaps because the blue-eyed kids had felt the sting of being ostracized and didn't want to inflict it on their former tormentors.

When the exercise ended, some of the kids hugged, some cried. Elliott reminded them that the reason for the lesson was the King assassination, and she asked them to write down what they had learned. Typical of their responses was that of Debbie Hughes, who reported that "the people in Mrs. Elliott's room who had brown eyes got to discriminate against the people who had blue eyes. I have brown eyes. I felt like hitting them if I wanted to. I got to have five minutes extra of recess." The next day when the tables were turned, "I felt like quitting school. . . . I felt mad. That's what it feels like when you're discriminated against."

Elliott shared the essays with her mother, who showed them to the editor of the weekly Riceville Recorder . He printed them under the headline "How Discrimination Feels." The Associated Press followed up, quoting Elliott as saying she was "dumbfounded" by the exercise's effectiveness. "I think these children walked in a colored child's moccasins for a day," she was quoted as saying.

That might have been the end of it, but a month later, Elliott says, Johnny Carson called her. "Would you like to come on the show?" he asked.

Elliott flew to the NBC studio in New York City. On the "Tonight Show" Carson broke the ice by spoofing Elliott's rural roots. "I understand this is the first time you've flown?" Carson asked, grinning.

"On an airplane, it is," Elliott said to appreciative laughter from the studio audience. She chatted about the experiment, and before she knew it was whisked off the stage.

Hundreds of viewers wrote letters saying Elliott's work appalled them. "How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children," one said. "Black children grow up accustomed to such behavior, but white children, there's no way they could possibly understand it. It's cruel to white children and will cause them great psychological damage."

Elliott replied, "Why are we so worried about the fragile egos of white children who experience a couple of hours of made-up racism one day when blacks experience real racism every day of their lives?"

The people of riceville did not exactly welcome Elliott home from New York with a hayride. 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. Some residents were furious.

When Elliott walked into the teachers' lounge the next Monday, several teachers got up and walked out. When she went downtown to do errands, she heard whispers. She and her husband, Darald Elliott, then a grocer, have four children, and they, too, felt a backlash. Their 12-year-old daughter, Mary, came home from school one day in tears, sobbing that her sixth-grade classmates had surrounded her in the school hallway and taunted her by saying her mother would soon be sleeping with black men. Brian, the Elliotts' oldest son, got beaten up at school, and Jane called the ringleader's

mother. "Your son got what he deserved," the woman said. When Sarah, the Elliotts' oldest daughter, went to the girls' bathroom in junior high, she came out of a stall to see a message scrawled in red lipstick on the mirror: "Nigger lover."

Elliott is nothing if not stubborn. She would conduct the exercise for the nine more years she taught the third grade, and the next eight years she taught seventh and eighth graders before giving up teaching in Riceville, in 1985, largely to conduct the eye-color exercise for groups outside the school. In 1970, she demonstrated it for educators at a White House Conference on Children and Youth. ABC broadcast a documentary about her work. She has led training sessions at General Electric, Exxon, AT&T, IBM and other corporations, and has lectured to the IRS, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Department of Education and the Postal Service. She has spoken at more than 350 colleges and universities. She has appeared on the "Oprah Winfrey Show" five times.

The fourth of five children, Elliott was born on her family's farm in Riceville in 1933, and was delivered by her Irish-American father himself. She was 10 before the farmhouse had running water and electricity. She attended a oneroom rural schoolhouse.Today, at 72, Elliott, who has short white hair, a penetrating gaze and no-nonsense demeanor, shows no signs of slowing. 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.

Elliott's friends and family say she's tenacious, and has always had a reformer's zeal. "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 stirs people up."

Vision and tenacity may get results, but they don't always endear a person to her neighbors. "Mention two words—Jane Elliott—and you get a flood of emotions from people," says Jim Cross, the Riceville Recorder 's editor these days. "You can see the look on their faces. It brings up immediate anger and hatred."

When I met Elliott in 2003, she hadn't been back to Riceville in 12 years. We walked into the principal's office at RicevilleElementary School, Elliott's old haunt. The secretary on duty looked up, startled, as if she had just seen a ghost. "We want to see Room No. 10," Elliott said. It was typical of Elliott's blunt style—no "Good morning," no small talk. The secretary said the south side of the building was closed, something about waxing the hallways. "We just want to peek in," I volunteered. "We'll just be a couple of minutes."

Absolutely not. "This here is Jane Elliott," I said. "She taught in this school for 18 years." "I know who she is."

We backed out. I was stunned. Elliott was not. "They can't forget me," she said, "and because of who they are, they can't forgive me."

We stopped on Woodlawn Avenue, and a woman in her mid-40s approached us on the sidewalk. "That you, Ms. Elliott?"

Jane shielded her eyes from the morning sun. "Malinda? Malinda Whisenhunt?"

"Ms. Elliott, how are you?"

The two hugged, and Whisenhunt had tears streaming down her cheeks. Now 45, she had been in Elliott's third grade class in 1969. "Let me look at you," Elliott said. "You know, sweetheart, you haven't changed one bit. You've still got that same sweet smile. And you'll always have it."

"I've never forgotten the exercise," Whisenhunt volunteered. "It changed my life. Not a day goes by without me thinking about it, Ms. Elliott. When my grandchildren are old enough, I'd give anything if you'd try the exercise out on them. Would you? Could you?"

Tears formed in the corners of Elliott's eyes.

The corn grows so fast in northern Iowa—from seedling to seven-foot-high stalk in 12 weeks—that it crackles. In the early morning, dew and fog cover the acres of gently swaying stalks that surround Riceville the way water surrounds an island. The tallest structure in Riceville is the water tower. The nearest traffic light is 20 miles away. The Hangout Bar & Grill, the Riceville Pharmacy and ATouch of Dutch, a restaurant owned by Mennonites, line Main Street. In a grassy front yard down the block is a hand-lettered sign: "Glads for Sale, 3 for $1." Folks leave their cars unlocked, keys in the ignition. Locals say that drivers don't signal when they turn because everyone knows where everyone else is going.

Most Riceville residents seem to have an opinion of Elliott, whether or not they've met her. "It's the same thing over and over again," Cross says. "It's Riceville 30 years ago. Some people feel we can't move on when you have her out there hawking her 30-year-old experiment. It's the Jane Elliott machine."

Walt Gabelmann, 83, was Riceville's mayor for 18 years beginning in 1966. "She could get kids to do anything she wanted them to," he says of Elliott. "She got carried away by this possession she developed over human beings."

A former teacher, Ruth Setka, 79, said she was perhaps the only teacher who would still talk to Elliott. "I think third grade was too young for what she did. Junior high, maybe. Little children don't like uproar in the classroom. And what she did caused an uproar. Everyone's tired of her. I'm tired of hearing about her and her experiment and how everyone here is a racist. That's not true. Let's just move on."

Steve Harnack, 62, served as the elementary school principal beginning in 1977. "I don't think this community was ready for what she did," he said. "Maybe the way to sell the exercise would have been to invite the parents in, to talk about what she'd be doing. You must get the parents first."

Dean Weaver, 70, superintendent of Riceville schools from 1972 to 1979, said, "She'd just go ahead and do things. She was a local girl and the other teachers were intimidated by her success. Jane would get invited to go to Timbuktu to give a speech. That got the other teachers angry."

For years scholars have evaluated Elliott's exercise, seeking to determine if it reduces racial prejudice in participants or poses a psychological risk to them. The results are mixed. Two education professors in England, Ivor F. Goodson and Pat Sikes, suggest that Elliott's experiment was unethical because the participants weren't informed of its real purpose beforehand. Alan Charles Kors, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, says Elliott's diversity training is "Orwellian" and singled her out as "the Torquemada of thought reform." 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." 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. But not Elliott. She repeated the abuse with subsequent classes, and finally turned it into a fully commercial enterprise."

Others have praised Elliott's exercise. In Building Moral Intelligence: The Seven Essential Virtues That Teach Kids to Do the Right Things , educational psychologist Michele Borda says it "teaches our children to counter stereotypes before they become full-fledged, lasting prejudices and to recognize that every human being has the right to be treated with respect." Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist at George WashingtonUniversity, says the exercise helps develop character and empathy. And StanfordUniversity psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo writes in his 1979 textbook, Psychology and Life , that Elliott's "remarkable" experiment tried to show "how easily prejudiced attitudes may be formed and how arbitrary and illogical they can be." Zimbardo—creator 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."

Elliott defends her work as a mother defends her child. "You have to put the exercise in the context of the rest of the year. Yes, that day was tough. Yes, the children felt angry, hurt, betrayed. But they returned to a better place—unlike a child of color, who gets abused every day, and never has the ability to find him or herself in a nurturing classroom environment." As for the criticism that the exercise encourages children to distrust authority figures—the teacher lies, then recants the lies and maintains they were justified because of a greater good—she says she worked hard to rebuild her students' trust. The exercise is "an inoculation against racism," she says. "We give our children shots to inoculate them against polio and smallpox, to protect them against the realities in the future. There are risks to those inoculations, too, but we determine that those risks are worth taking."

Elliott says the role of a teacher is to enhance students' moral development. "That's what I tried to teach, and that's what drove the other teachers crazy. School ought to be about developing character, but most teachers won't touch that with a ten-foot pole."

Elliott and I were sitting at her dining room table. The smell of the crops and loam and topsoil and manure wafted though the open door. Outside, rows of corn stretched to the horizon. "There's a sense of renewal here that I've never seen anywhere else," Elliott says.

It occurs to me that for a teacher, the arrival of new students at the start of each school year has a lot in common with the return of crops each summer.

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. It makes you proud."

Get the latest Science stories in your inbox.

Advertisement

Why Jane Elliott's Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Racism Exercise Is So Powerful

• Share Content on Facebook
• Share Content on LinkedIn
• Share Content on Flipboard
• Share Content on Reddit
• Share Content via Email

For the past 52 years, teacher and diversity trainer Jane Elliott has been constantly cuffing people about the head — figuratively speaking — on the subject of racism. It's not pretty when the straight-talking Midwesterner launches into her from-the-heart harangue on the evils of racial discrimination. It can be uncomfortable, even — squirm-in-your-seat, stare-at-your-shoes uncomfortable — when she subjects someone to the very same exercise she first unleashed on third graders more than a half-century ago, designed to expose racist thinking. Some think her method can get downright mean .

But, again: The subject is racism. Nothing about it is pretty.

"You think that's traumatizing?" Elliott says of her in-your-face educational methods, which have been alternately vilified and celebrated through the years. "Try living that way for a lifetime."

Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes Exercise

Education on racism, challenges to ending racism.

Elliott came to prominence when, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr . in 1968, she took her classroom of all-white third graders in Riceville, Iowa, and decided to teach them what it was like to face discrimination. She separated the kids into two groups — those with brown eyes and those with blue — and proceeded to proclaim the brown eyes the "superior" group. She allowed the group extra privileges (more time at recess, seats in the front of the room). They were told they were cleaner. Smarter. More talented.

How the children reacted to this newfound pecking order was startling. The brown-eyed group immediately began to wield their dominance. The blue-eyeds almost immediately slipped into the role of subordinates. Anger flared. Disputes popped up.

After switching roles a few days later, which gave both sides of the classroom a taste of being the "lesser" group, the exercise ended. Many parents, after reading about what happened in Elliott's classroom through student essays printed in the local paper, complained. A month or so later, Johnny Carson invited Elliott to appear on his late-night talk show. She became a national story.

Many praised her efforts at opening her students' eyes. But not everybody. From a 2005 story in Smithsonian Magazine :

Elliott taught for years before she decided to take her anti-racism lesson out of the classroom and into corporate America. She's also led the exercise for the U.S. Department of Education and other governmental groups. She's appeared before numerous church and school assemblies. She often faces uncomfortable, sometimes angry, reactions.

She was on Oprah Winfrey's TV show several times. In June 2020, she appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon . Her goal, as it has been for the past 52 years, is education. It's the best weapon against racism, she says.

But good education about racism and race is hard to find.

"Because the educators believe the same thing that they were taught, and they were taught the same thing that I was, which is that there are three or four different races and you can tell what a man's intelligence is by the color of his skin or the shape of his head," says Elliott from her home in Iowa. "You can't lead people out of ignorance if you're still teaching that Columbus discovered America and we came here to civilize these savages.

"We need to teach the three Rs of Rights, Respect and Responsibility," she says, barely taking a breath. "If teachers would respect the rights of those students to learn the truth, and be held responsible for seeing that they present them with the truth, we could kill racism in two generations. There's not a doubt in my mind that that could be done."

For all of her life, Elliott, 87, has seen America grapple with racism. She's marked major mileposts in the struggle over the past 50 or so years: the Civil Rights movement and the assassination of King in the '60s. The race riots in Miami's Liberty City in 1980 and in Los Angeles after the Rodney King beating in 1992.

Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 (the killing of Michael Brown). Baltimore (Freddy Brown) and Charleston, South Carolina, (a church massacre) in 2015. There are many others.

But the problem she has been relentlessly attacking, Elliott says, goes far beyond the occasional race-based flareup. For people of color in the U.S., facing down racism is an everyday fight. Every minute of every day. It's exhausting.

"It's only been going on with me for 52 years," Elliott says. "I know black women who have been doing this for 89 years, and their mothers did and their grandmothers did and their great-grandmothers did. And their daughters and their granddaughters and their great-granddaughters are going to have to do it unless we get off our polyunsaturated fatty acids and do something about this.

"I get paid to talk about it. They aren't even allowed to talk about it."

One of the biggest hurdles in educating people about racism in the United States, Elliott says, is that most everyone knows it exists and knows that it's harmful, but few are motivated to change it. She has stood in front of classes and asked who among the white people in the room would want to switch places with a Black person. No one ever volunteers.

But in 2020, after a lifetime of trying to teach people that humans are one race, that all human life springs from Africa, and that the separation of humans into races has no biological basis and is used only for various (often nefarious) societal reasons, Elliott sees some small signs of promise, maybe a faint sign of movement.

"I think the killing of George Floyd forced people of the pale-faced variety to recognize that the things that Black people have been describing as happening to them every day were finally real for us. Finally," she says. "It was in their face, and they finally had to admit that they have been denying, or ignoring, or justifying what has happened to Black males all these years."

But in the next breath, Elliott cautions that recognizing the problem is only the first step. Correcting it still must be done. And with the current racial tensions in the United States, exacerbated (she believes) by the current president, things could get even worse.

"'Those who forget the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them.' And we are repeating. We are repeating," she says. "I'm seeing this happen, I watch the news, and I go downtown, and oh my god, they're replicating the blue eyes, brown eyes exercise in the national sphere. I can't believe it."

Still, Elliott is nothing if not persistent. She will continue to educate "for the next 50 years," she says. She will push her mantra of " one race ." And she says, she will urge people to get out and vote this November in the hope of electing leaders who will attack racism, as she has, head on.

"There'll be hope after the November election," she says. "That's the only hope we have right now."

The biggest words on Elliott's website are the top headline: One Race . The science behind the simple words is clear. According to the National Human Genome Research Institute, your genome — the body's blueprint that contains all of your DNA — is 99.9 percent the same as every human around you.

Please copy/paste the following text to properly cite this HowStuffWorks.com article:

Featured Topics

Featured series.

A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.

Explore the Gazette

Read the latest.

EVs fight warming but are costly. Why aren’t we driving $10,000 Chinese imports?

Toll of QAnon on families of followers

The urgent message coming from boys

Psychology professor Mina Cikara.

Jon Ratner/Harvard Staff Photographer

Looking at how prejudice is learned, passed

Research suggests power, influence of watching behavior of others

Nikki Rojas

Harvard Staff Writer

Watching how others behave is one of the primary ways people learn social cues and appropriate behaviors. But might that also be a way biases are spread and perpetuated?

A recent psychology study in Science Advances aims to understand how prejudice might be passed along this way and how that contributes to societal-level inequality.

“Transmission of social bias through observational learning” was a collaboration between Harvard, the University of Amsterdam, and the Karolinska Institute. Researchers conducted a series of experiments in which participants observed people who are aware of the stereotypes (demonstrators) and members of stereotyped groups (targets).

“There’s something about watching the choice transpire that is then inculcating in observers an inference about the chosen person despite there being no rational evidence for that person’s generosity , ” said Mina Cikara , professor of psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and co-author of the study, which involved how subjects select players in a money-sharing game.

In the first two experiments, participants were asked to observe interactions in a money-sharing exercise between a demonstrator and players from two social groups, which were given descriptions aligning with positive or negative stereotypes of white and Black Americans. The demonstrator picked one of the players to interact with, who then responded by sharing or not sharing a reward. On average, the participants showed a preference for those of the positively stereotyped group.

Participants who observed these interactions without knowledge of the stereotypes driving demonstrators’ choices were then asked to make their own choices. They tended to exhibit the group bias expressed by demonstrators.

“We found that people can form prejudice by observing the interactions of others, specifically by observing the actions of a prejudiced actor toward members of separate social groups,” explained lead co-author David Schultner , a postdoc in the lab of co-author and principal researcher Björn Lindström at Karolinska Institute. “After observing such biased intergroup interactions, observers then in turn expressed a similar bias themselves.”

When researchers asked participants to explain their decisions, they pointed to perceived differences over reward feedback between the two groups that was inaccurate. 

“It’s important to note though, that observers were sensitive both to individuals’ history of giving rewards and their group membership,” cautioned Cikara. “Participants paid quite a bit of attention to what they had learned about individual actors when they were making their own selection. It wasn’t just that they were copying prejudice completely ignoring the cost to their own outcomes or self-interests.”

A control experiment administered in study three was particularly enlightening, the authors noted. For this experiment, participants observed interactions involving actors who displayed more overt bias toward players in a bid to make it easier for observers to pick up on the prejudice and potentially adjust their own behavior. Results, however, still reflected the bias seen before.

Participants were given additional information about chosen and unchosen players during the fourth study. However, this failed to change preconceived beliefs these participants had for the two social groups.

“It blew my mind that the transmission still persisted, because it just made so clear how important the choosing rather than the outcome was for this process,” Cikara said.

The research team then introduced a computer actor making random choices in the fifth study to discover whether having a nonhuman demonstrator made a difference. This might prevent observers from thinking that a human demonstrator knew something about the targets, the psychologists believed.

What they found was virtually no difference between those following human actions and those following a computer. “It’s not 100 percent clear why people acted the way they did,” Schultner said. “It could be that people anthropomorphize the computer [or] … that people assumed this was actually a purposeful robot.”

“The connection to AI was serendipitous because that’s something we care about in other studies: how prejudice and stereotypes work their way into artificial intelligence and are recapitulated back to users, which then lead users to act, often unwittingly, in ways that reinforce those prejudices,” added senior co-author David Amodio, professor of social psychology at the University of Amsterdam.

So, what does this mean for the real world? Cikara urged caution about what the research could mean outside of the confines of the highly controlled lab experiments the team conducted but noted it could lead to important inquiries into social media.

“Our broader goal is to understand the psychological mechanisms through which societal prejudices and stereotypes get inside the heads of individuals and affect their behavior,” Amodio said. “This new work looks at what happens next — once a bias forms in an individual’s head, how does it get back out into the community from which it can begin to influence society more broadly.”  

Share this article

You might like.

Experts say tension between trade, green-tech policies hampers climate change advances; more targeted response needed

New book by Nieman Fellow explores pain, frustration in efforts to help loved ones break free of hold of conspiracy theorists

When we don’t listen, we all suffer, says psychologist whose new book is ‘Rebels with a Cause’

Billions worldwide deficient in essential micronutrients

Inadequate levels carry risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes, blindness

You want to be boss. You probably won’t be good at it.

Study pinpoints two measures that predict effective managers

Weight-loss drug linked to fewer COVID deaths

Large-scale study finds Wegovy reduces risk of heart attack, stroke

Shopping Cart

Articles & Insights

Expand your mind and be inspired with Achology's paradigm-shifting articles. All inspired by the world's greatest minds!

Dividing by Color: The Impact of the Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Experiment by Jane Elliott

By amelia sinclair, this article is divided into the following sections:.

The Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Experiment, conducted by educator Jane Elliott in 1968, profoundly influenced our understanding of prejudice and discrimination. This pioneering exercise aimed to simulate the effects of racism by dividing participants based on an arbitrary characteristic—eye color.

By examining the methodology, findings, and implications of the experiment, we can gain crucial insights into the dynamics of discrimination, the psychology of prejudice, and the power of experiential learning.

Methodology and Design

Jane Elliott designed the Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Experiment to demonstrate the arbitrary and irrational nature of racial discrimination. Conducted initially with her third-grade classroom in Riceville, Iowa, the experiment involved dividing the students into two groups based on their eye color: blue-eyed and brown-eyed.

On the first day, Elliott designated the blue-eyed children as superior, granting them privileges and encouraging them to discriminate against the brown-eyed children. The latter were subjected to various forms of mistreatment, such as sitting at the back of the classroom and wearing collars to signify their lower status.

The next day, Elliott reversed the roles, designating the brown-eyed children as superior and the blue-eyed children as inferior. This role reversal allowed all students to experience both sides of discrimination and privilege within a controlled environment. Elliott observed the interactions and behaviors of the children throughout the experiment, noting changes in their attitudes, performance, and self-esteem.

This experimental design allowed Elliott to simulate the effects of systemic racism and explore the impact of arbitrary discrimination on individuals’ behavior and self-perception.

Key Findings

The results of the Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Experiment were both revealing and transformative for educational psychology and social justice. Elliott found that the children quickly adopted the prejudiced behaviors associated with their designated status. Those labeled as superior exhibited increased confidence, performed better academically, and engaged in discriminatory behavior towards their peers. Conversely, those labeled as inferior displayed lower self-esteem, poorer academic performance, and heightened anxiety and distress.

These findings highlighted the powerful influence of social conditioning and authority on individuals’ attitudes and behaviors. The experiment demonstrated that even arbitrary distinctions could create deep-seated prejudice and discrimination, leading to significant psychological and emotional consequences. It underscored the idea that discrimination is learned behavior and that societal structures and authority figures play a crucial role in perpetuating biases.

The Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Experiment provided compelling evidence that prejudice and discrimination are deeply embedded in social dynamics and can be easily manipulated through authority and social conditioning. It emphasized the need for critical awareness and education to combat these destructive behaviors.

Psychological Mechanisms and Implications

The experiment illuminated several psychological mechanisms underlying prejudice and discrimination. One key factor is the role of authority and social conditioning, where individuals adopt behaviors and attitudes endorsed by authority figures and societal norms. In the test, Elliott’s authoritative role as a teacher significantly influenced the children’s acceptance and enactment of discriminatory behavior.

Another important mechanism is the concept of in-group and out-group dynamics, where individuals develop strong affiliations with their perceived group while harboring negative attitudes towards those outside the group. In the Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Experiment, the arbitrary division based on eye color created a sense of in-group cohesion and out-group hostility, mirroring the dynamics of racial discrimination in broader society.

These insights have profound implications for understanding the dynamics of prejudice and discrimination. The findings emphasize the importance of addressing societal structures and authority figures that perpetuate bias and promoting inclusive and equitable environments. They also highlight the potential for experiential learning to challenge and change discriminatory attitudes and behaviors.

Ethical Considerations

While the Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Experiment provided valuable insights into prejudice and discrimination, it also raised ethical considerations related to the potential psychological impact on participants. The experiment involved subjecting children to simulated discrimination and mistreatment, raising concerns about the potential distress and long-term effects of the exercise.

Modern ethical standards prioritize minimizing harm and ensuring the welfare of research participants. Researchers must obtain informed consent, provide thorough debriefing, and ensure that any induced behaviors do not have adverse long-term effects. The ethical considerations surrounding the Blue Eyes Experiment have contributed to the development of stricter guidelines to protect participants while advancing scientific knowledge.

Broader Societal Impact

The insights gained from the Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Experiment have significant implications for various fields, including education, social policy, and diversity training. Understanding the dynamics of prejudice and discrimination can inform strategies to promote inclusivity, equity, and social justice.

In education, recognizing the psychological impact of discrimination underscores the need for curricula and teaching methods that challenge biases and promote empathy and understanding. Educators can use this knowledge to create inclusive learning environments that celebrate diversity and foster positive relationships among students.

In social policy, the findings highlight the importance of addressing systemic discrimination and promoting policies that support equality and inclusion. Policymakers can use this knowledge to create initiatives and programs that combat prejudice, promote diversity, and ensure equal opportunities for all individuals.

In diversity training, the insights from the Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Experiment emphasize the potential for experiential learning to challenge and change discriminatory attitudes. Organizations can use this knowledge to develop training programs that raise awareness about bias, encourage self-reflection, and promote inclusive behaviors.

Theoretical Contributions

The Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Experiment has made significant contributions to psychological theories, particularly in understanding the impact of social conditioning and authority on prejudice and discrimination. It provided empirical support for the concept of in-group and out-group dynamics and highlighted the role of societal structures in shaping individuals’ attitudes and behaviors.

The research also contributed to the broader discourse on social psychology, emphasizing the importance of creating supportive and inclusive environments that promote equality and challenge discriminatory practices. By elucidating the mechanisms underlying prejudice and discrimination, the Blue Eyes Experiment has informed theoretical frameworks and research on social identity, authority, and the impact of discrimination.

The Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Experiment conducted by Jane Elliott remains a cornerstone in the study of prejudice and discrimination. Through innovative design and rigorous methodology, the experiment revealed the profound psychological and emotional impact of arbitrary discrimination, challenging societal norms and contributing to pivotal social justice efforts.

As we reflect on the legacy of the Blue Eyes Experiment, its lessons continue to resonate in various fields, from education to social policy to diversity training. The research highlights the importance of addressing and challenging discriminatory practices and social conditioning to promote inclusivity and equality. It underscores the significance of thoughtful and ethical approaches to studying and addressing the complexities of prejudice and discrimination.

The enduring relevance of the Blue Eyes Experiment attests to its significance in the ever- evolving field of psychology . Its contributions to our understanding of prejudice and the impact of discrimination provide valuable guidance for creating conditions that promote positive social change and equal opportunities for all individuals. Ultimately, Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Experiment serves as a powerful reminder of the intricate interplay between social dynamics, authority, and discrimination.

Browse Achology Quotes:

► Book Recommendation of the Month

The ultimate life coaching handbook by kain ramsay.

A Comprehensive Guide to the Methodology, Principles and practice of Life Coaching

Misconceptions and industry shortcomings make life coaching frequently misunderstood, as many so-called coaches fail to achieve real results. The lack of wise guidance further fuels this widespread skepticism and distrust.

Get updates from the Academy of Modern Applied Psychology

About Achology

Useful links, our policies, our 7 schools, connect with us, © 2024 achology.

There was a problem reporting this post.

Block Member?

Please confirm you want to block this member.

You will no longer be able to:

• Mention this member in posts

Please allow a few minutes for this process to complete.

The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine

Reading Room

Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: On Race and Jane Elliott’s Famous Experiment on Prejudice

by Stephen G. Bloom

I t started with a phone call. “Is this Stephen Bloom?” an emphatic voice asked out of the blue one spring morning seventeen years ago. Without waiting for a response, the caller sprinted ahead. “Well, this is Jane Elliott and I want to talk to you!” I had never spoken with or met Elliott before and I had no idea why she’d be calling me. She seemed insistent and determined. The only thing I knew about Elliott was a provocative classroom experiment credited to her.

For a decade, Elliott, a teacher in a small, rural Iowa town, had separated her third-grade students, for two days, into two groups—those with blue eyes and those with brown eyes. On the first day, she told the blue-eyed children that they were genetically inferior to the brown-eyed children. She instructed the blue-eyed kids that they wouldn’t be permitted to play on the jungle gym or swings. They’d have to use paper cups if they wanted to drink from the water fountain. They wouldn’t be allowed second lunch helpings. The next day, Elliott switched the students’ roles. The brown-eyed kids would now be considered inferior. The experiment was Elliott’s way of showing eight- and nine-year-old White children what it was like to be Black in America. Starting in the mid-1980s and for the next thirty-five years, Elliott would increase the experiment’s voltage by trying it out on adults in thousands of workshops worldwide.

I asked Elliott why she had called me, and without hesitation, she responded, “Because I want you to write a book about me.” Elliott’s moxie piqued my curiosity, and as soon as I got off the phone, I set out to learn more.

Years before the Black Lives Matter movement or the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in the summer of 2020, Elliott, a White woman from out-of-the-way Iowa, had transformed herself into an international authority on all issues of racism and bias. An award-winning network TV documentary had aired about her, followed by a starring role at a headline- sparking White House conference on education. By 1984, Elliott had left her public school teacher’s job in Riceville, Iowa (population: 806), sixteen miles from the Wisconsin state line, and had taken the blue-eyes, brown-eyes experiment on the road. She tried it on tens of thousands of adults, in the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, and Australia. She traveled to conferences and corporate workshops.

She took the experiment to prisons, schools, and military bases. She appeared on Oprah five times. Elliott became a standing-room-only speaker at hundreds of colleges and universities. In the process, she had turned herself into America’s mother of diversity training.

Elliott was so successful at what she did that she was granted membership in the historic pantheon of the West’s most revered educators: Plato, Aristotle, Horace Mann, Booker T. Washington, John Dewey, Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, and Paulo Freire. In 2004, the American publishing giant, McGraw Hill, created a multipanel poster suitable for classroom display that included Elliott along with the other venerated thinkers and teachers. To me, Elliott’s separation of students based on their eye color seemed like a risky experiment that raised all kinds of ethical issues. In fact, as I was to learn, the experiment had been inspired by Nazis, as Elliott would be the first to admit. She had lied to impressionable children who trusted her. She had told them that half of the class was less intelligent because of their eye color, because of their genetics. The experiment became so real that fistfights erupted on the Riceville Elementary School playground. That seemed bad enough. But Elliott did nothing to stop the fights. She encouraged them, based on the children’s newly granted superiority or inferiority. That was part of duping the children into thinking that the experiment was real.

Elliott had constructed a gut-wrenching, true-life nightmare in order to make an indelible point that would stay with her students for the rest of their lives. In essence, she tried to induce a dose of racism into the minds of the third graders.

It all began the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, when Jane Elliott asked her all-White third-grade students “How do you think it would feel to be a Negro boy or girl? It would be hard to know, wouldn’t it, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves. Would you like to find out?”

A spontaneous cheer arose from the children. YAAAAAAAAY! And so began one of the most astonishing exercises ever conducted in an American classroom. That spring morning 50 years ago, the blue-eyed children were set apart from the children with brown or green eyes. “It might be interesting to judge people by the color of their eyes,” Elliott teased. “Would you like to try?” Elliott then pulled out green construction paper armbands and asked each of the blue-eyed kids to wear one. “The browneyed people are the better people in this room,” Elliott began. “They are cleaner and they are smarter.”

“They are not,” one blue-eyed boy said under his breath from the group in the back. “Oh, yes, they are!” Elliott said, her eyes open wide. She wagged her index finger at the blue-eyed boy with the audacity to question her. “Brown-eyed people are more intelligent than blue-eyed people. It’s about time you knew the truth. You’re old enough to know this.”

Elliott issued more directives. “All you brown-eyed children, push your desks to the front of the room.” The children looked puzzled. “You heard me. Push them to the front. You’re the smarter kids. That’s where you belong!” The comment didn’t seem to register with the children, so Elliott repeated it. “Go ahead,” she told the brown-eyed group. “You ought to be sitting up front. Blue-eyed children, push your desks to the back. As far away as you can!”

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. “Eye color, hair color and skin color are caused by a chemical,” Elliott went on, writing MELANIN on the blackboard. Melanin, she said, is what causes intelligence. The more melanin, the darker the person’s eyes—and the smarter the person. “Brown-eyed people have more of that chemical in their eyes, so brown-eyed people are better than those with blue eyes,” Elliott said. “Blue-eyed people sit around and do nothing. You give them something nice and they just wreck it.” She could feel a chasm forming between the two groups of students.

“Do blue-eyed people remember what they’ve been taught?” Elliott asked. “No!” the brown-eyed kids said. Elliott rattled off the rules for the day, saying blue-eyed kids had to use paper cups if they drank from the water fountain. “Why?” one girl asked. “Because we might catch something,” a brown-eyed boy said. Everyone looked at Mrs. Elliott. She nodded. As the morning wore on, brown-eyed kids berated their blue-eyed classmates. “Well, what do you expect from him, Mrs. Elliott,” a brown-eyed student said as a blue-eyed student got an arithmetic problem wrong. “He’s a bluey!”

Then, the inevitable: “Hey, Mrs. Elliott, how come you’re the teacher if you’ve got blue eyes?” a browneyed boy asked. Just before Elliott could answer, brown-eyed Steven Knode jumped in. “If she didn’t have ’em blue eyes, she’d be the principal!” Elliott couldn’t help but grin, at least to herself, not just for Steven’s insight, but because Mr. Brandmill, the principal, did, in fact, have brown eyes.

Next, she informed the children that no one from the blue-eyed group would be allowed on the playground equipment, because, she said, “They’re careless. Everyone knows that. They might break something.” Elliott went further, instructing the brown-eyed children not to allow any of the blue-eyed kids to play with them—even if they were friends. “Brown-eyed children need to play only with brown-eyed children. Blue-eyed children, you play among yourselves. There will be no exceptions. Does everyone understand?” “Yes, Mrs. Elliott.” Elliott issued more rules. The blue-eyed children would have to wait for the brown-eyed students to finish before being allowed to eat lunch. For recess, the brown-eyed children would get five more minutes. “Do you understand, children? Have I made myself clear?” Yes, Mrs. Elliott!

For the rest of the morning, Elliott was unrelenting. While on the playground, brown-eyed Bruce Fox would later recall, “Mrs. Elliott told a boy who was getting bullied that the next time that happens, ‘You smack ’em in the nose.’ She put her fingers together in a fist to show how it ought to be done.” If blueeyed students were playing jump rope or kickball, Fox remembered, Elliott urged the brown-eyed kids, “You take it away from them! That’s your right! Do it! ” A brown-eyed student, Debra Anderson, recalled, “One of my friends had blue eyes, and I couldn’t play with her. I kinda hung out by myself and played on the swings and the monkey bars. I felt sick.”

At lunchtime, Elliott hurried to the teachers’ lounge. She described to her colleagues what she’d done, remarking how several of her slower kids with brown eyes had transformed themselves into confident leaders of the class. Withdrawn browneyed kids were suddenly outgoing, some beaming with the widest smiles she had ever seen on them. She asked the other teachers what they were doing to bring news of the King assassination into their classrooms. The answer, in a word, was nothing.

Back in the classroom, a smart, tall, blue-eyed girl by the name of Carol Anderson, who never had problems with arithmetic, started making all kinds of mistakes when Elliott called on her. When Carol walked across the room, her shoulders slumped and she dragged her feet. Carol had always had a ramrod-straight posture, but since the morning, she had turned into a different person. Anyone could see that all the confidence that had once defined her had disappeared. During recess in the schoolyard, Carol, flushed and red in the face, came running to Elliott, sobbing. Three brown-eyed girls had ganged up on her, and one of them had hit her, warning, “You better apologize to us for getting in our way because we’re better than you are! Mrs. Elliott said so!”

On Monday, Elliott reversed the exercise, and the brown-eyed kids were told how shifty, dumb and lazy they were . Later, it would occur to Elliott that the blue-eyed kids were much less nasty than the browneyed kids had been, perhaps because the blue-eyed kids had felt the sting of being ostracized and didn’t want to inflict it on their former tormentors.

When the exercise ended, some of the kids hugged, some cried. Elliott reminded them that the reason for the lesson was the King assassination, and she asked them to write down what they had learned. Typical of their responses was that of Debbie Hughes, who reported that “the people in Mrs. Elliott’s room who had brown eyes got to discriminate against the people who had blue eyes. I have brown eyes. I felt like hitting them if I wanted to. I got to have five minutes extra of recess.” The next day when the tables were turned, “I felt like quitting school…. I felt mad. That’s what it feels like when you’re discriminated against.”

Elliott shared the essays with her mother, who showed them to the editor of the weekly Riceville Recorder . He printed them under the headline “How Discrimination Feels.” The Associated Press followed up, quoting Elliott as saying she was “dumbfounded” by the exercise’s effectiveness. “I think these children walked in a colored child’s moccasins for a day,” she was quoted as saying. That might have been the end of it, but a month later, Elliott says, Johnny Carson called her. Not an assistant, a producer, or a long-distance operator. It was Carson himself. Before Elliott could catch her breath, Carson announced, “We’d like you to come on the show and talk about the experiment you did on the kids in your class, the one separating the blue-eyed kids from the brown-eyed kids.”

Carson’s invitation to Elliott to appear on the show had been an experiment itself. A year earlier, Carson had told author Alex Haley for a Playboy interview that he sympathized with Black protesters. In a restrained, allholds- barred interview, he allowed, “It all comes down to just one basic word: justice —the same justice for everyone — in housing, in education, in employment and, most difficult of all—in human relations. And we’re not going to accomplish that until all of us, Black and White, begin to temper our passion with compassion.”

Elliott flew to the NBC studio in New York City. On the Tonight Show Carson broke the ice by spoofing Elliott’s rural roots. “I understand this is the first time you’ve flown?” Carson asked, grinning. “On an airplane, it is,” Elliott said to appreciative laughter from the studio audience. She chatted about the experiment, and before she knew it was whisked off the stage.

Elliott’s message on Tonight Show No. 1442 came across blunt and unfiltered. Blacks in America were treated as second-class citizens and Whites didn’t have a clue about it. And even if they did, the last thing Whites were about to do was reshuffle the stacked deck Blacks had been dealt. Elliott’s solution was to teach children, kids as young as eight years old, the damage that Whites imparted every day to Blacks. And the best approach was to follow Lloyd Jennison’s “Indian” maxim: to walk a mile in someone else’s moccasins.

Hundreds of viewers wrote letters saying Elliott’s work appalled them. “How dare you try this cruel experiment out on White children,” one said. “Black children grow up accustomed to such behavior, but White children, there’s no way they could possibly understand it. It’s cruel to White children and will cause them great psychological damage.” Elliott replied, “Why are we so worried about the fragile egos of White children who experience a couple of hours of made-up racism one day when Blacks experience real racism every day of their lives?”

The people of Riceville did not exactly welcome Elliott home from New York with a hayride. 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. Some residents were furious.

Through persistence, diligence, and perhaps worst of all, in the eyes of Riceville, sheer ambition, Elliott had catapulted herself to immortality. Regarded, respected, revered. Outside Riceville, she was a visionary, a combination of Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt, and maybe even Joan of Arc. Inside, she was a con artist. Elliott hated the values that some Riceville parents had instilled in their children. Elliott seemed to know what these young children would grow up to become—unless she imprinted her wisdom on their squishy, developing brains. Elliott’s mission was to administer a mind-altering social-experiment inoculation, even though neither the kids nor their parents had asked for such a vaccination.

Elliott is nothing if not stubborn. She would conduct the exercise for the nine more years she taught the third grade, and the next eight years she taught seventh and eighth graders before giving up teaching in Riceville, in 1985, largely to conduct the eye-color exercise for groups outside the school.

For a host of reasons, some serendipitous, others calculated, the experiment Elliott popularized in 1968 multiplied at dizzying, geometric speed. It spread to other teachers and school districts across the nation and around the world. Thousands of teachers and trainers would adopt the experiment and try it out on students young and old. During the dawning era of multiculturalism, hundreds of corporations used the experiment on their workers. For some who sat at Elliott’s feet, it changed them for the good. The experiment exposed them to racism and its far-reaching impact. But for others, decades after being tormented by an experiment ostensibly designed to teach about racism, many of her subjects still feel the wallop of Elliott’s smack-them-over-the-head method. For more than a few who experienced it, Elliott’s self-proclaimed exercise turned into a monster experiment.

For years scholars have evaluated Elliott’s exercise, seeking to determine if it reduces racial prejudice in participants or poses a psychological risk to them. The results are mixed. Two education professors in England, Ivor F. Goodson and Pat Sikes, suggest that Elliott’s experiment was unethical because the participants weren’t informed of its real purpose beforehand. Alan Charles Kors, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, says Elliott’s diversity training is “Orwellian” and singled her out as “the Torquemada of thought reform.” 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.” 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. But not Elliott. She repeated the abuse with subsequent classes, and finally turned it into a fully commercial enterprise.”

Others have praised Elliott’s exercise. In Building Moral Intelligence: The Seven Essential Virtues That Teach Kids to Do the Right Things , educational psychologist Michele Borda says it “teaches our children to counter stereotypes before they become full-fledged, lasting prejudices and to recognize that every human being has the right to be treated with respect.” Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist at George Washington University, says the exercise helps develop character and empathy. And Stanford University psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo writes in his 1979 textbook, Psychology and Life , that Elliott’s “remarkable” experiment tried to show “how easily prejudiced attitudes may be formed and how arbitrary and illogical they can be.” Zimbardo—creator of the also controversial 1971 Stanford Prison 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.”

In 2003, Tracie Stewart, a social psychologist at Kennesaw State University in Atlanta, was the lead author in a study to gauge the efficacy of the blueeyes, brown-eyes experiment. Stewart used as her test case a workshop that Elliott conducted in 2000 with students at Bard College, a small, private undergraduate institution in Annandale-on-Hudson, in New York State. So as not to skew their findings, Stewart and her coinvestigators looked for Bard students who hadn’t heard of the experiment or of Elliott. Once accepted into the workshop, participants signed informed consent forms: “You should be aware that the learning exercise may be a difficult experience for some. Participants will take part in group discussions during which they may be exposed to harsh comments and uncomfortable conditions…. If you have a medical condition that might be aggravated by stressful situations or feel that you should avoid stressful situations at the present time, do not sign up for this project.”

Elliott conducted the experiment, which started early on a Saturday morning and lasted eight hours. She followed her routine, sorting forty-seven participants into a blue-eyed (and green- and hazel-eyed) group and a brown-eyed cohort. The blues were crowded into a small, stuffy room with half the number of chairs as people, while the browns were served a full breakfast in a comfortable setting. Per her drill, Elliott prompted the brown-eyed participants to act rudely toward the other group when the two sections convened. She also gave the brown-eyed students answers to an IQ test she would administer to both groups later that day.

When the two groups merged, Elliott had the blueeyed students, wearing collars, sit in the middle of the room while the brown-eyed group sat on either side as though they were observing the “inferior” group. She proceeded to criticize the blues. She had them stand one at a time and read derogatory passages denigrating blue-eyed people. She scolded their performances. When the browns outscored the blues on the fake IQ test, Elliott amped up her scorn of the blues. She picked a blue-eyed, blond woman for ridicule, announcing to everyone that she wasn’t a natural blonde and likely dyed her hair. To another woman, Elliott commented about her “cute butt” and “bedroom voice.” All the while, she encouraged the brown-eyed students to join in on the hectoring. The insults got so intense that two blueeyed students started to cry. One got up and left.

The two groups broke for lunch, returned to debrief, watched the 1970 ABC video “Eye of the Storm,” ate hors d’oeuvres together in the late afternoon, and then left, the experiment officially over. During the next four to six weeks, both groups were assessed by Stewart and her colleagues to see if the experiment had made any impact on their self-awareness of prejudice and racism.

The results were decidedly mixed. The responses from the students mirrored what participants in the U.S. West pluralism workshops in the 1980s had said. They noted a multitude of insults and pain shared by the participants, but minimal change in attitude. Among the student reactions:

“As a Blue Eyes, I was uncomfortable and on edge. I found myself easily angered by anything Jane Elliott said. I felt frustrated and helpless to stop her charade (she was good at her job).” “I feel some of it was unethical, however, there were so many positive responses I can only believe that the positive outweighs the negatives…. I’ve had a few nightmares, but this is typical…” “Makes people upset; doesn’t change much; too negative for me.” “I felt emotionally low after the experiment [exercise]. I wanted to try to forget some of the things that were said or done on the day of the experiment, but I guess that’s what made it so effective.”

Stewart’s thoughts today about the experiment are “proceed with caution.” She said that the experiment may have a positive impact on reducing negative racial attitudes “in the short term,” but any long-term benefits are negligible. Stewart no longer shows videos of Elliott in her undergraduate psychology classes because “there tends to be a greater focus on Jane Elliott herself than the issue of institutional racism.”

A larger, systematic review, published in 2009, that assessed the effectiveness of scores of anti-bias workshops and experiments summarily suggested that further study was needed. “We conclude that the casual effects of many widespread prejudice-reduction interventions, such as workplace diversity training and media campaigns, remain unknown. Although some intergroup contact and cooperation interventions appear promising, a much more rigorous and broad-ranging empirical assessment of prejudice reduction strategies is needed to determine what works.” In other words, the social scientists weren’t able to say that any crash course to modify racial prejudice works.

Today, teachers still readily employ the blue-eyes, brown-eyes experiment. For many, it is an inspired and clever way to introduce the concept of discrimination and race to youngsters.

In 2009, Elliott took the experiment to Great Britain, where she performed it for a television documentary called The Event in London. There, the thirty participants were adults. Following her script, Elliott threw profanity-laced insults at the collared “inferior” group of blue-eyed participants. As during the experiment’s last iteration on The Oprah Show , the experiment imploded. Many of the UK participants refused to tolerate Elliott’s bullying and walked out.

The show hired two psychologists to stand in the wings during the experiment in case anyone needed intervention, as well as to provide a sports-style playby- play commentary for viewers at home. One was Dominic Abrams, a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent, who today, more than a decade later, doesn’t quite know what to think of Elliott or what she did. “She is a very strong personality and did not appear to treat challenge as anything other than a battle to be won. She certainly had no desire to engage with me as a psychologist (or indeed as a person), so other than her brusque manner toward myself and the production team (which may have been partly an extension of her character part for the day), it was difficult to gain a sense of what she might have been thinking or intending,” Abrams wrote in an email.

Guardian journalist Andrew Anthony was less sanguine. Writing about the British iteration of the experiment, Anthony noted, “Nowadays, grey-haired and mean-eyed, she’s honed her shtick to that of a drill sergeant or prison commandant. She describes herself as the ‘resident bitch for the day,’ and speaks to the blue-eyed contingent as though they were criminally stupid or stupidly criminal. ‘Keep your fucking mouth shut,’ she tells one smiling blue-eyed young man. ‘I don’t play second banana.’ The performance suggests someone who would be a natural in a Maoist re-education camp: self-righteous, vindictive and unswervingly convinced of her case.”

Anthony concluded that Elliott was “more excited by White fear than she is by Black success.”

This article appeared in Skeptic  magazine 27.3 Buy print edition Buy digital edition Subscribe to print edition Subscribe to digital edition Download our app

Elliott defends her work as a mother defends her child. “You have to put the exercise in the context of the rest of the year. Yes, that day was tough. Yes, the children felt angry, hurt, betrayed. But they returned to a better place—unlike a child of color, who gets abused every day, and never has the ability to find him or herself in a nurturing classroom environment.” As for the criticism that the exercise encourages children to distrust authority figures—the teacher lies, then recants the lies and maintains they were justified because of a greater good—she says she worked hard to rebuild her students’ trust. The exercise is “an inoculation against racism,” she says. “We give our children shots to inoculate them against polio and smallpox, to protect them against the realities in the future. There are risks to those inoculations, too, but we determine that those risks are worth taking.”

Elliott remains as sharp-tongued, contrary, resolute, and opinionated as ever. She has updated her lectures to include a range of contemporary issues: the concept of race (“There’s only one race, the human race”); the Black Lives Matter movement (“It’s insane what we’ve been doing to people of color for the last 250 years”), White supremacists (“They’re coming out of the woodwork”), persistent women (“‘Bitch’ is an acronym for ‘Being in Total Control, Honey’”), former President Trump (“He is basing his political philosophy on writings of Adolf Hitler”), racism among White evangelicals (“Jesus did not look like the little Pillsbury Doughboy”), and oppression of Native Americans (“We call Native Americans ‘savages’ but it was Whites who killed them and stole their lands”). Her most recent lectures mention COVID-19, as well as the LGBTQ and Latinx communities. Elliott hasn’t given up her interest in public education, which is at the center of any presentation she gives (“We could destroy racism in two generations by changing what is taught in classrooms all over the United States, but first we’d have to change the level of racism among the teachers”).

For decades, Elliott has issued sweeping generalizations, including her oft-repeated declaration that all Whites in America are racists. “If you are looking at a White person who was born, reared, and schooled in the United States, then you are looking at a racist,” she told an audience at the University of Northern Colorado as far back as 1993. “Blacks aren’t racist; they are only reacting to the actions of Whites.”

Elliott often refers to herself as “a faded Black person.” When she spoke with actress Jada Pinkett Smith on her Facebook Watch show, Red Table Talk , in 2018, she said, “My people moved far from the Equator and that’s the only reason my skin is lighter. That’s all any White person is.” She concedes that as a White woman speaking about how some Black people might feel, she may be guilty of accusations that she’s a charlatan and a poseur. “There are those Blacks who ask me what a White woman like me is doing talking about their experience, since I can’t possibly know what it’s like to walk in their shoes. Sometimes I’m accused of just running another White woman’s game. Those are valid criticisms.”

What truly motivated Elliott to introduce an experiment to a roomful of third graders and to make two days last more than five decades? Perhaps she was seeking an exit from what she envisioned would be her own humdrum life. She had something personal to prove, a game of one-upmanship amid a landlocked sea of naysayers who had looked down on her ever since she’d been born. What was it about her that seemed to require that she push the limits, shocking everyone—starting with children? Was it to make up for the shortcomings the locals had assigned her? Was it to make her father proud? Was it to get back at the locals and their sense of what it meant to be successful, particularly as a woman? Was it to show the other teachers in the chatty teachers’ lounge how horribly wrong they were?

Based on the author’s 2021 book Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality , published by University of California Press, excerpted with permission. © 2021 by Stephen G. Bloom

About the Author

Stephen G. Bloom is a professor of journalism at the University of Iowa and author of six nonfiction books: Postville ; Inside the Writer’s Mind ; Tears of Mermaids ; The Oxford Project ; The Audacity of Inez Burns ; and Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes .

Stephen Bloom on The Michael Shermer Show

Listen to Michael Shermer’s conversation with Stephen Bloom exploring the never-before-told true story of Jane Elliott and the “Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes Experiment” she made world-famous, using eye color to simulate racism. Shermer and Bloom discuss: Jane Elliott and how she came to conduct her famous 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, obedience to authority, role playing, social proof • whether the experiment reveals hidden racist attitudes or creates them in children • Does it indicate bad apples or bad barrels? • race sensitivity training programs, then and now (and why they don’t really work) • what drives moral progress • the future of journalism.

This article was published on November 22, 2022.

SKEPTIC App

Whether at home or on the go, the SKEPTIC App is the easiest way to read your favorite articles. Within the app, users can purchase the current issue and back issues. Download the app today and get a 30-day free trial subscription.

• About the Society
• Skepticism 101
• Current Issue
• Subscribe (Print)
• Subscribe (Digital)
• Buy Print Issues
• Buy Digital Issues
• Submit an article
• About the Podcast
• Watch/Listen
• Apple Podcasts
• Amazon Music
• Google Podcasts

Expeditions

• About Our Expeditions
• Greenland to Nova Scotia (2024)
• Ireland to Iceland (2024)
• Meet the Researchers
• Become Involved
• 1-805-576-9396
• General Inquiries
• Website Inquiries
• Orders Support
• Subscriptions Support
• Change Address
• Shop Online
• Subscriptions
• Back Issues

• Social Psychology

Blue Eyes and Brown Eyes: The Jane Elliott Experiment

Full Episodes

• The Podcast

Jane Elliott's "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" Anti-Racism Experiment

Thomas Jefferson's Black And White Relatives Meet Each Other

Season 13 Episode 13100

The Freedom Riders Reunite 50 Years Later

Season 25 Episode 25100

Best Life Week: Relationships, Intimacy, and Sex

Season 23 Episode 23174

Best Life Week: Finding Your Spiritual Path

Season 23 Episode 23180

Nate's Time Warp Decorating Rescue

Season 22 Episode 22133

Incredible Weight Loss Stories

Season 17 Episode 17153

Dr. Phil Helps Couples Who Can't Talk To Each Other

Season 16 Episode 16217

Lifestyle Makeovers: Toxic Relationships

Season 15 Episode 15121

Nate's Small Space Miracle

Season 21 Episode 21200

Hooked on Plastic Surgery at Age 28

Season 19 Episode 19151

Make-Unders: How'd You Get That Way?

Season 24 Episode 24199

Best Life Week: Dr. Oz and the Ultimate Health Checklist

Season 23 Episode 23172

Inside the Lives of Hoarders, Part 2

Season 22 Episode 22166

Inside the Lives of Hoarders

Season 22 Episode 22106

Dr. Phil on Marriage & Money

Season 15 Episode 15186

Best Life Week: Your Money Plan

Season 23 Episode 23177

Oprah Goes Back In Time

Season 18 Episode 18231

Oprah's "What Can You Live Without" Experiment

Season 23 Episode 23199

When Sexual Appetites Don't Match

Season 16 Episode 16183

America's Silent Killer: Oprah & Dr. Oz Want to Save Your Life

Season 24 Episode 24181

Barbara Walters: 'You Must Have Someone to Love'

A 70-Year-Old Woman Shares Her Age-Defying Secrets

Rwandan Genocide Survivors Are Reunited With Their Family After 12 Years

When Sibling Rivalry Turns Ugly

Tyra Banks and Her Brother Get Candid About Sibling Rivalry

A Kindness Social Experiment in New York and Los Angeles

Boy Says He Had an Encounter With a Wizard During Near-Death Experience

A Woman On Her Near-Death Experience: "I Saw This White Light"

The Teen Manipulated Into Killing Her Stepmom By Her Dad

WATCH OWN APP

Download the Watch OWN app and access OWN anytime, anywhere. Watch full episodes and live stream OWN whenever and wherever you want. The Watch OWN app is free and available to you as part of your OWN subscription through a participating TV provider.

NEWSLETTERS

SIGN UP FOR NEWSLETTERS TODAY AND ENJOY THE BENEFITS.

• Stay up to date with the latest trends that matter to you most.
• Have top-notch advice and tips delivered directly to you.
• Be in the know on current and upcoming trends.

OPRAH IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF HARPO, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © 2024 HARPO PRODUCTIONS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. OWN: OPRAH WINFREY NETWORK

The Daring Racism Experiment That People Still Talk About 20 Years Later (VIDEO)

More than 20 years ago, "The Oprah Winfrey Show" conducted an experiment about racial prejudice that audiences will never forget. The year was 1992 -- in the wake of the deadly Los Angeles riots that erupted after the acquittal of police officers on trial for the beating of Rodney King -- and racial tensions in the country were running high. Yet, the "Oprah Show" audience members didn't suspect a thing when they arrived at the studio and were immediately separated into two distinct groups.

The division wasn't based on skin color, but eye color. "What we did was treat each group differently, discriminating against the people who have blue eyes, catering to those people with brown eyes," Oprah explained back then.

As the audience lined up to enter the studio, the blue-eyed people were pulled out of line, told to put on a green collar and wait outside. The brown-eyed people were told to step to the front of the line. Once indoors, the brown-eyed group was then treated to coffee and doughnuts, while the blue-eyed group could only stand around and wait. When the blue-eyed group saw that the brown-eyed group was going to be seated first, some became upset.

"Look at those people! What are they doing in there?" one woman shrieked.

When the show began, Oprah welcomed diversity expert Jane Elliott to the stage. Elliott helped set up the experiment, and she knowingly added fuel to the fire when she spoke. "I've been a teacher for 25 years in the public, private and parochial schools in this country, and I have seen what brown-eyed people have done as compared to what blue-eyed people do. It's perfectly obvious," she said. "You should have been here this morning when we brought these people in here."

Feeling discriminated against, the blue-eyed audience members stood to voice their frustrations.

"She was rude to us! All of us!" one woman said. "Yelled at us, called us names, pushed us aside. She was rude!"

"Why doesn't Jane have a green collar on? She's got blue eyes," another pointed out.

Elliott didn't hesitate in her answer. "Because I've learned to act brown-eyed," she said. "And the message in this room is, act brown-eyed and you, too, can take off your collar."

The blue-eyed people were flabbergasted, but it wasn't long before the brown-eyed people bought into the idea that they were superior. "People, I had a girlfriend in school who was blue-eyed. She was so stupid, she was always copying off of my papers," said one brown-eyed woman. "These [blue-eyed] people were so rude and so noisy today, we couldn't hear ourselves even talk!"

Eventually, the audience figured out that the show was really about race. "God created one race: the human race," Elliott told them. "Human beings created racism."

Twenty-two years after that memorable episode, "Oprah: Where Are They Now?" caught up with Elliott, who still gets emotional when talking about the catalyst that led her to create the blue-eyed-brown-eyed experiment in 1968.

"Martin Luther King, Jr. had been one of our 'heroes of the month' in February in my third-grade classroom, and he was dead at the hands of an assassin," Elliott says, getting choked up. "I hate to talk about this because every time I talk about it, I remember how it felt that day. I was going to have to go into my classroom and explain to my students why the adults in this country had allowed somebody to kill hope. Martin Luther King, for me, was hope for this country."

In an effort to get her small-town, all-white class to experience what it was like to walk in someone else's shoes, she created the eye-color experiment. "I decided the next day that I was going to do what Hitler did. I was going to pick out a group of people on the basis of a physical characteristic over which they had no control, separate them... treat one group badly and treat the other group very well, and see what would happen," Elliott says.

Why eye color? "Eye color and skin color are caused by the same chemical: melanin," Elliott explains. "There's no logic in judging people by the amount of a chemical in their skin. Pigmentation should have nothing to do with how you treat another person, but unfortunately, it does."

What she found with the experiment is how incredible its impact can be.

"Give me a child at the age of 8 and let me do that exercise, and that child is changed forever," Elliott says.

Throughout January, OWN hosts a month-long celebration honoring civil rights legends, as we approach the 50th anniversary of the historic Selma to Montgomery marches led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Support Free Journalism

Consider supporting HuffPost starting at $2 to help us provide free, quality journalism that puts people first.

Can't afford to contribute? Support HuffPost by creating a free account and log in while you read.

Thank you for your past contribution to HuffPost. We are sincerely grateful for readers like you who help us ensure that we can keep our journalism free for everyone.

The stakes are high this year, and our 2024 coverage could use continued support. Would you consider becoming a regular HuffPost contributor?

The stakes are high this year, and our 2024 coverage could use continued support. We hope you'll consider contributing to HuffPost once more.

Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages.

From Our Partner

More in own.

A Revealing Experiment

Brown v. board and "the doll test", doctors kenneth and mamie clark and "the doll test".

In the 1940s, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark designed and conducted a series of experiments known colloquially as “the doll tests” to study the psychological effects of segregation on African-American children. Drs. Clark used four dolls, identical except for color, to test children’s racial perceptions. Their subjects, children between the ages of three to seven, were asked to identify both the race of the dolls and which color doll they prefer. A majority of the children preferred the white doll and assigned positive characteristics to it. The Clarks concluded that “prejudice, discrimination, and segregation” created a feeling of inferiority among African-American children and damaged their self-esteem. 

The doll test was only one part of Dr. Clark’s testimony in Brown vs. Board – it did not constitute the largest portion of his analysis and expert report. His conclusions during his testimony were based on a comprehensive analysis of the most cutting-edge psychology scholarship of the period.

A "Disturbing" Result

In an interview on the award-winning PBS documentary of the Civil Rights movement, “Eyes on the Prize,” Dr. Kenneth Clark recalled: “The Dolls Test was an attempt on the part of my wife and me to study the development of the sense of self-esteem in children. We worked with Negro children—I’ll call black children—to see the extent to which their color, their sense of their own race and status, influenced their judgment about themselves, self-esteem. We’ve now—this research, by the way, was done long before we had any notion that the NAACP or that the public officials would be concerned with our results. In fact, we did the study fourteen years before Brown , and the lawyers of the NAACP learned about it and came and asked us if we thought it was relevant to what they were planning to do in terms of the Brown decision  cases. And we told them it was up to them to make that decision and we did not do it for litigation. We did it to communicate to our colleagues in psychology the influence of race and color and status on the self-esteem of children.”

In a particularly memorable episode, while Dr. Clark was conducting experiments in rural Arkansas, he asked a black child which doll was most like him. The child responded by smiling and pointing to the brown doll: “That’s a nigger. I’m a nigger.” Dr. Clark described this experience “as disturbing, or more disturbing, than the children in Massachusetts who would refuse to answer the question or who would cry and run out of the room.”

"The Doll Test" in Brown v. Board of Education

The Brown team relied on the testimonies and research of social scientists throughout their legal strategy. Robert Carter, in particular, spearheaded this effort and worked to enlist the support of sociologists and psychologists who would be willing to provide expert social science testimony that dovetailed with the conclusions of “the doll tests.” Dr. Kenneth Clark provided testimony in the Briggs, Davis , and Delaware cases and co-authored a summary of the social science testimony delivered during the trials that were endorsed by 35 leading social scientists.

The Supreme Court cited Clark’s 1950 paper in its Brown decision and acknowledged it implicitly in the following passage: “To separate [African-American children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Dr. Kenneth Clark was dismayed that the court failed to cite two other conclusions he had reached: that racism was an inherently American institution and that school segregation inhibited the development of white children, too.

An "Incorrigible Integrationist"

Although Dr. Kenneth Clark is most famous for the “Doll Tests,” his personal achievements are equally as prestigious. He was the first African American to earn a PhD in psychology at Columbia; to hold a permanent professorship at the City College of New York; to join the New York State Board of Regents; and to serve as president of the American Psychological Association. His wife Mamie Clark was the first African-American woman and the second African-American, after Kenneth Clark, to receive a doctorate in psychology at Columbia.

In 1946, the Clarks founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem, where they conducted experiments on racial biases in education. During the ’50s and ’60s, the Clarks focused on New York City schools.  Dr. Kenneth Clark was a noted authority on integration, and in particular, he and his wife were closely involved in the integration efforts of New York City and New York State. Dr. Kenneth Clark said of Harlem that “children not only feel inferior but are inferior in academic achievement.” He headed a Board of Education commission to ensure that the city’s schools would be integrated and to advocate for smaller classes, a more rigorous curriculum, and better facilities for the poorest schools.

The Clarks also created Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, or Haryou, in 1962 which was endorsed by then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson, whose administration earmarked $110 million to finance the program. Haryou recruited educational experts to better structure Harlem schools, provide resources and personnel for preschool programs and after-school remedial education, and reduce unemployment among blacks who had dropped out of school. Dr. Clark was a staunch advocate of the total integration of American society — his peers described him as an “incorrigible integrationist.”

Brown v. Board of Education

The case that changed america.

Learn more about the history of the landmark case, key players, and how Brown vs. Board shaped our nation.

Copy short link

• Help & FAQ

Prejudice Reduction: Progress and Challenges

Research output : Contribution to journal › Review article › peer-review

The past decade has seen rapid growth in research that evaluates methods for reducing prejudice. This essay reviews 418 experiments reported in 309 manuscripts from 2007 to 2019 to assess which approaches work best and why. Our quantitative assessment uses meta-analysis to estimate average effects. Our qualitative assessment calls attention to landmark studies that are noteworthy for sustained interventions, imaginative measurement, and transparency. However, 76% of all studies evaluate light touch interventions, the long-term impact of which remains unclear. The modal intervention uses mentalizing as a salve for prejudice. Although these studies report optimistic conclusions, we identify troubling indications of publication bias that may exaggerate effects. Furthermore, landmark studies often find limited effects, which suggests the need for further theoretical innovation or synergies with other kinds of psychological or structural interventions. We conclude that much research effort is theoretically and empirically ill-suited to provide actionable, evidence-based recommendations for reducing prejudice.

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

• General Psychology
• anti-racism
• diversity training
• interventions
• meta-analysis
• randomized control trials

Access to Document

• 10.1146/annurev-psych-071620-030619

Other files and links

• Link to publication in Scopus
• Link to the citations in Scopus

Fingerprint

• Prejudice Psychology 100%
• Psychological Intervention Keyphrases 50%
• Structural Interventions Keyphrases 50%
• Intervention Use Keyphrases 50%
• Assessment Use Keyphrases 50%
• Salves Keyphrases 50%
• Meta-Analysis Psychology 33%
• Publication Bias Psychology 33%

T1 - Prejudice Reduction

T2 - Progress and Challenges

AU - Paluck, Elizabeth Levy

AU - Porat, Roni

AU - Clark, Chelsey S.

AU - Green, Donald P.

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2021 Annual Reviews Inc.. All rights reserved.

PY - 2021/1/4

Y1 - 2021/1/4

N2 - The past decade has seen rapid growth in research that evaluates methods for reducing prejudice. This essay reviews 418 experiments reported in 309 manuscripts from 2007 to 2019 to assess which approaches work best and why. Our quantitative assessment uses meta-analysis to estimate average effects. Our qualitative assessment calls attention to landmark studies that are noteworthy for sustained interventions, imaginative measurement, and transparency. However, 76% of all studies evaluate light touch interventions, the long-term impact of which remains unclear. The modal intervention uses mentalizing as a salve for prejudice. Although these studies report optimistic conclusions, we identify troubling indications of publication bias that may exaggerate effects. Furthermore, landmark studies often find limited effects, which suggests the need for further theoretical innovation or synergies with other kinds of psychological or structural interventions. We conclude that much research effort is theoretically and empirically ill-suited to provide actionable, evidence-based recommendations for reducing prejudice.

AB - The past decade has seen rapid growth in research that evaluates methods for reducing prejudice. This essay reviews 418 experiments reported in 309 manuscripts from 2007 to 2019 to assess which approaches work best and why. Our quantitative assessment uses meta-analysis to estimate average effects. Our qualitative assessment calls attention to landmark studies that are noteworthy for sustained interventions, imaginative measurement, and transparency. However, 76% of all studies evaluate light touch interventions, the long-term impact of which remains unclear. The modal intervention uses mentalizing as a salve for prejudice. Although these studies report optimistic conclusions, we identify troubling indications of publication bias that may exaggerate effects. Furthermore, landmark studies often find limited effects, which suggests the need for further theoretical innovation or synergies with other kinds of psychological or structural interventions. We conclude that much research effort is theoretically and empirically ill-suited to provide actionable, evidence-based recommendations for reducing prejudice.

KW - anti-bias

KW - anti-racism

KW - diversity training

KW - interventions

KW - meta-analysis

KW - randomized control trials

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85099044457&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85099044457&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1146/annurev-psych-071620-030619

DO - 10.1146/annurev-psych-071620-030619

M3 - Review article

C2 - 32928061

AN - SCOPUS:85099044457

SN - 0066-4308

JO - Annual review of psychology

JF - Annual review of psychology

April 16, 2024

12 min read

The Science of Reducing Prejudice in Kids

Making schools more welcoming for all can make for a fair and just society

By Melanie Killen

Scott Bakal

C hildren, like adults, want to be fair and kind. At the same time, they can be quick to reject those they perceive as different. How does this contradiction arise? And how can we help children develop a sense of morality and justice?

“One time—this was, like, a long time ago—I was new in this school, but these people at the school used to judge me because of my skin color and used to disclude me and make fun of me,” Alex, a student of about 10, said to classmates as part of a study my colleagues and I conducted. (Students’ names have been changed for confidentiality.) “I wanted to be their friend. I kind of just, like, ignored them, but they still found a way to get to me. So, like, every single day I went crying to my mom and told her what happened. She just told me to ignore them, but that didn’t help, and it just, like, escalated to the point where I had to see a counselor and stuff.”

For many children, discrimination inflicts anxiety and misery and interferes with their learning. Schools could be far more welcoming than most now are, and I and other developmental psychologists have an idea of how to help them get there.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

After decades of investigating children’s moral de­­vel­op­ment, my colleagues and I have come to understand the reasoning children use to deal with the dissonance between their desire to be fair and their need to belong to friend groups. And we’ve figured out how to help them think through and share their views, particularly about what makes social exclusion unfair and why it’s necessary to stand up against stereotypes and biases .

We recently tested our intervention in a randomized, controlled trial, the gold standard for evaluating medical and social treatments, in a Maryland school district. The program significantly improved children’s ability to place themselves in one another’s shoes; enhanced their reasoning in moral conflicts; and helped to foster friendships across boundaries of ethnicity, class and gender. The intervention facilitated Alex’s sharing, after which another student related their experience of exclusion. Responding with empathy and support, the class talked about how to resolve such situations.

Such training and discussions not only help to reduce children’s prejudices but also burnish their ability to resolve conflicts and make school less stressful. Most important, they have the potential to make future societies more just and caring. As kids grow into adults, their ideas of “us versus them” too often harden into prejudices—and that has consequences. If George believes as an elementary school student that boys are better than girls at science, it could influence whom he invites to join the science club in middle school, as well as what he thinks as an adult about whether women can be good doctors, scientists or pilots. Our program shows kids how to challenge such stereotypes with the hope of making society better for everyone.

How do people acquire a sense of justice, and how early does it emerge? Pioneering Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget observed children’s play in search of answers to such questions. He wanted to understand how they develop precepts such as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” formalized by philosopher Immanuel Kant as the “categorical imperative.” In his 1932 book, The Moral Judgment of the Child , Piaget reported that even to children, intentions matter: one kid might injure another, but if it was an accident, no one was at fault. To kids, treating others with equality and respect is a matter of justice.

This robust foundation led to studies in multiple countries on how moral thinking emerges. Developmental scientists now know that it starts early: babies as young as eight months old who witness one puppet trying to climb a hill while other puppets either help or get in the way prefer the helper s to the hinderers. Such preferences, based on early forms of empathy, are not yet explicit moral judgments; those show up a couple of years later. By age three, children understand that hurting others is wrong. By age five, they start to share candy equally. Even some animals have a sense of what is wrong, as ethologist Frans de Waal of Emory University and others have demonstrated. In an experiment de Waal conducted with Sarah F. Brosnan, now at Georgia State University, a capuchin monkey became furious when she got a piece of cucumber as a reward for handing the experimenter a rock while another monkey instead got a real treat: a grape.

Children, like capuchins, are social beings, but human morality is exceedingly complicated and requires time to fully develop. As kids grow, family, friends, and others can help them understand why fairness and justice matter. My own lifelong interest in social justice may have something to do with my mother, who was active in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, and my grandfather, who was a leader for workers’ rights in San Francisco during the early 1950s. Growing up in Berkeley, Calif., I attended schools with almost equal proportions of Black, white and Asian students. When I went to college in Worcester, Mass., to study child psychology and moral development, I was surprised to discover that friend groups and dating circles were often segregated by race and ethnicity. I now think these influences contributed to my desire to understand how morality might win out over prejudice.

As an undergraduate, I worked with developmental psychologist William Damon , then at Clark University, on one of his studies of how fairly children divide up resources. In these experiments, chocolate bars were given to students as a reward for making bracelets. Young children often gave more bars to kids of their own gender and age, but by nine or 10 years old they either divided them up equally or gave more to those who had made more bracelets.

During my graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, I learned that adults make decisions about morality in the context of group conventions and cultural rituals. Curious about how children would react when rules and norms conflicted with morality, I worked with my thesis adviser, developmental psychologist Elliot Turiel, to offer children hypothetical scenarios and ask questions. If a team captain has to fetch a runaway ball for their team to stay in a tournament, should they do it even if it means ignoring the fact that a little kid is being bullied nearby? Younger children focused on getting the ball, but nine- or 10-year-olds were more willing to violate a convention—the obligation to take care of the team by retrieving the ball—to help the bullied child. As one student said, “Someone could get hurt, and even though you don’t win anything, it’s still good to see that human beings don’t fight.”

These studies made me wonder what happens when a kid’s friends are doing something wrong—rejecting or harassing another kid because of their ethnicity, for example. At the time, very few researchers were studying prejudice in childhood. Social psychologists began studying prejudice in the 1950s because of the dire need to understand how the Holocaust happened. In his book The Nature of Prejudice (Addison-Wesley, 1954 ), psychologist Gordon W. Allport argues against the idea of an “evil” leader being singularly responsible for that horror, instead focusing on how most Germans had clustered around a shared national identity to the exclusion of Jews, Communists, and others whom they perceived as different and threatening.

It was group dynamics rather than individual psychology that held the key to understanding prejudice, Allport postulated. He elucidated the mechanisms that fostered and maintained group loyalty (such as propaganda campaigns) and pointed out that intergroup contact based on common goals, cooperation, equal status and the support of authorities could reduce prejudice.

Jen Christiansen; Source: “Testing the Effectiveness of the Developing Inclusive Youth Program: A Multisite Randomized Control Trial,” by Melanie Killen et al., in Child Development , Vol. 93, No. 3; May/June 2022 ( reference )

But how do prejudices emerge in the first place? After moving to the University of Maryland in 1994 as a professor of human development, I teamed up with Charles Stangor, a member of the school’s psychology department, to study how groups of kids acted when race and gender came into play. Children didn’t always apply their ideas of fairness, we found, when they conflicted with the kids’ group identity. For example, they thought it was wrong to exclude a boy from a ballet club but also said the other kids “would think that John is strange if he takes ballet.” Kids rarely referred to stereotypes when responding to situations of exclusion involving race, however. Clearly, we had to investigate gender- and race-based exclusion differently.

In the early 2000s Martin D. Ruck of the City University of New York, David S. Crystal of Georgetown University and I learned that compared with teenagers who attended homogeneous schools, those who went to more racially diverse schools and had friends of other races and ethnicities were more likely to see race-based exclusion, such as having friends or dates only of the same race, as unfair.

These investigations showed that children identify with groups as early as preschool. These alliances provide social support, camaraderie and protection from bullies. But what happens when being a member of one group means going along with unfair treatment of someone from an out-group? With Adam Rutland of the University of Exeter and Dominic Abrams of the University of Kent, both in England, and my then graduate students Kelly Lynn Mulvey, now at North Carolina State University, and Aline Hitti, now at the University of San Francisco, I started studying how children navigate conflicts between their group affiliations and their sense of justice. When did children and adolescents recognize that their group might be doing something unfair? Would they tell their group that it was wrong, or would they just go along with it?

We showed children of diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds attending Maryland public schools picture cards and asked, for example, whether they thought it was all right for a kid in the picture (named, say, Jordan) to speak up if their after-school club was distributing money unfairly between itself and another club at school. Children between eight and 10 years old were more likely to think that Jordan would tell their friends they were doing something unfair and that those friends would then agree to do the right thing. More important, older children, aged 12 to 14 years, said it was okay for Jordan to tell their friends they were doing wrong, but the group would be unhappy and would probably exclude them. In other words, as they grew older, children came to recognize the cost of arguing against a group norm—a significant obstacle to challenging injustice.

So, for instance, a kid who wants to intervene when their group is teasing a friend of another religion or ethnicity might hesitate to act because they anticipate being kicked out. Further, if they did get rejected, they could be viewed as an outcast by others, adding to the penalty for challenging the norm. Offering hope, however, some kids were skilled at thinking about how to persuade their group to change for the better.

These studies made us wonder whether children would also favor their own group when sharing re­­sources. In one study, led by my then graduate student Laura Elenbaas, now at Purdue University, we asked children whether it was okay that a school attended by Black students got fewer school supplies than a school attended by white students (and vice versa). We also gave them books and other supplies and asked them to divide the items between the schools.

All the kids thought it unfair for one school to get less. But when it came to actually distributing the supplies, younger children had an “in-group bias.” Five- to six-year-olds gave more to the schools that had less to begin with, but they were more likely to give when the disadvantaged school was attended by kids of their own race. In contrast, when giving to schools that had less to begin with, the 10- to 11-year-olds gave more supplies to the schools with Black students than to the schools with white students because, as one kid said, “I’ve often seen that they have less when others have more.”

Surprisingly, there were no differences based on race and ethnicity of the children when it came to giving more to Black schools. A parallel study with my former graduate student Michael Rizzo, currently at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, similarly revealed that a kid’s gender made no difference in how they allocated stickers: they gave more to boys (not girls) who made “blue monster trucks” and to girls (not boys) who made “pink princess dolls.” But as they got older, they allocated more equally.

Regardless of race and gender, kids struggled to prioritize what was right and just over their prejudices and in-groups. The good news was that as children matured, they moved toward what was fair.

P utting together the lessons garnered over decades of research, our team developed what we referred to as the social reasoning developmental model of how children weigh fairness in the context of group dynamics. Morality is more than recognizing that treating someone differently because of their skin color, gender or religion is unfair, we postulated. It requires understanding that systemic biases create disadvantages for certain groups and recognizing when it is necessary to level the playing field.

Using this model, we formulated a set of further questions to understand how to help children become resisters of injustice, or “agents of change.” What factors enabled them to reject unfair treatment of others? And because each child belongs to multiple groups, what happens when these identities come into conflict? It’s not only race and ethnicity but also wealth that confers status, for instance. Which matters more when it comes to exclusion? To answer this question, Amanda R. Burkholder, now at Furman University in South Carolina, and I asked children aged eight to 14 to pick a new member of their club. Children predicted that their peers would pick someone of similar wealth even if they were of a different race, indicating that economic class was a better predictor of common interest than race.

By 2015 we felt we knew enough about children’s moral development to design a program to reduce bias and prejudice, promote friendships across social boundaries and help kids stand up to the unfair treatment of others. Above all, we wanted a program that dealt with children’s own experiences rather than the hypothetical scenarios we’d used in our basic research.

Our intervention program, called Developing In­­clu­sive Youth, offers scenarios involving a morally complex situation and gives children a chance to think through their response and then discuss it with their classmates. After initial testing, we coupled this program with training for elementary school teachers on creating a safe space for classroom discussions so children could think and speak for themselves without being pushed toward any particular ideas.

During the program, elementary school kids be­­tween eight and 11 years of age gather in a classroom once a week for eight weeks. Each week they in­­ter­act with an animated online tool to reflect on and discuss a different type of inclusion or exclusion based on gender, race (Black or white), ethnicity (Asian, Arabic or Latinx), immigrant status or wealth status.

First they get a laptop, put on headphones, then watch 15 minutes of a vignette. As an example, the program might present a situation in which a girl wants to work on a science project with a group of boys. One boy says girls aren’t good at science. Another challenges this notion, saying his sister is good at science. What should they do? After the students watching the program have privately entered their responses, the teacher leads them in a 30-minute discussion while they sit in a circle in the classroom.

During one such session on science and gender, a student shared this story: “I think it was at the University of Maryland summer camp ... we were all inside the dining hall eating dinner, and we saw some older kids do arm wrestles. So [one girl] went up to them and was like—she went up to a boy and was like, ‘Hey, do you want to arm wrestle?’ And then he’s like, ‘You’re a girl; you can’t beat me.’ She ended up crushing him!”

The class yelled in glee, asking how many seconds it took. Then another student offered, “Yeah, at my dad’s work, they’re getting the boys the best jobs and the girls the worst jobs” with less money, after which a third student said, “That’s really unfair!”

The randomized, controlled trial showed that children who went through this program were more likely to view exclusion as wrong; think of children of other groups as nice, hardworking and smart; and have higher expectations about the math and science abilities of children outside their race, ethnicity or gender. Further, they were more eager to play with kids who were different from them and reported fewer social rejections. Many teachers told us they learned new things about their students and became closer to them; the class bonded together more, and, most encouragingly, the students applied what they learned to new contexts, such as when the class read a news article.

Implemented widely, this program has the potential to better equip future generations to stand up to injustice. As one student put it, “No matter who you are, you’re just—you’re part of the civilization. You’re part of humanity. You’re not, like, an alien from an­­other planet.”

Melanie Killen is a professor of human development and quantitative methodology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She studies the emergence of morality and prejudice and is a member of the National Academy of Education.

• A-Z Publications

Annual Review of Psychology

Volume 60, 2009, review article, prejudice reduction: what works a review and assessment of research and practice.

• Elizabeth Levy Paluck 1 , and Donald P. Green 2
• View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: 1 Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138; email: [email protected] 2 Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8209; email: [email protected]
• Vol. 60:339-367 (Volume publication date January 2009) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.60.110707.163607
• © Annual Reviews

This article reviews the observational, laboratory, and field experimental literatures on interventions for reducing prejudice. Our review places special emphasis on assessing the methodological rigor of existing research, calling attention to problems of design and measurement that threaten both internal and external validity. Of the hundreds of studies we examine, a small fraction speak convincingly to the questions of whether, why, and under what conditions a given type of intervention works. We conclude that the causal effects of many widespread prejudice-reduction interventions, such as workplace diversity training and media campaigns, remain unknown. Although some intergroup contact and cooperation interventions appear promising, a much more rigorous and broad-ranging empirical assessment of prejudice-reduction strategies is needed to determine what works.

Article metrics loading...

Full text loading...

Literature Cited

• Aboud FE , Doyle AB . 1996 . Does talk of race foster prejudice or tolerance in children?. Can. J. Behav. Sci. 28 : 161– 70 [Google Scholar]
• Aboud FE , Levy SR . 2000 . Interventions to reduce prejudice and discrimination in children and adolescents. Reducing Prejudice and Discrimination S Oskamp 269– 93 Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum [Google Scholar]
• Allport G . 1954 . The Nature of Prejudice Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley 537 [Google Scholar]
• Am. Psychol. Assoc 2001 . Declaration for the UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance http://wwwapaorg/pi/oema/racismdeclarationpdf [Google Scholar]
• Aronson E , Blaney N , Stephan W , Sikes J , Snapp M . 1978 . The Jigsaw Classroom Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage [Google Scholar]
• Banaji MR . 2001 . Implicit attitudes can be measured. The Nature of Remembering: Essays in Honor of Robert G. Crowder HL Roediger, JS Nairne, I Neath, AM Surprenant 117– 50 Washington, DC: Am. Psychol. Assoc. [Google Scholar]
• Bandura A . 1986 . Social Foundations of Thought and Action Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall [Google Scholar]
• Bandura A . 2006 . Toward a psychology of human agency. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 1 : 164– 80 [Google Scholar]
• Bargal D , Bar H . 1992 . A Lewinian approach to intergroup workshops for Arab-Palestinian and Jewish youth. J. Soc. Issues 48 : 139– 54 [Google Scholar]
• Bargh JA , Chen M , Burrows L . 1996 . Automaticity of social behavior: direct effect of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 71 : 230– 44 [Google Scholar]
• Batson CD . 1991 . The Altruism Question: Toward a Social-Psychological Answer Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum 272 [Google Scholar]
• Baumeister R , Leary M . 1997 . Writing narrative literature reviews. Rev. Gen. Psychol. 13 : 311– 20 [Google Scholar]
• Berry JW . 1984 . Multicultural policy in Canada: a social psychological analysis. Can. J. Behav. Sci. 16 : 353– 70 [Google Scholar]
• Bettencourt A , Brewer M , Croak M , Miller N . 1992 . Cooperation and the reduction of intergroup bias: the role of reward structure and social orientation. J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 284 : 301– 19 [Google Scholar]
• Bigler RS . 1999 . The use of multicultural curricula and materials to counter racism in children. J. Soc. Issues 55 : 687– 705 [Google Scholar]
• Blair I . 2002 . The malleability of automatic stereotypes and prejudice. Personal. Soc.Psychol. Rev. 63 : 242– 61 [Google Scholar]
• Blanchard FA , Crandall CS , Brigham JC , Vaughn LA . 1994 . Condemning and condoning racism: a social context approach to interracial settings. J. Appl. Psychol. 79 : 993– 97 [Google Scholar]
• Blanchard FA , Lilly T , Vaughn LA . 1991 . Reducing the expression of racial prejudice. Psychol. Sci. 2 : 101– 5 [Google Scholar]
• Bodenhausen GV , Kramer GP , Süsser K . 1994 . Happiness and stereotypic thinking in social judgment. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 66 : 621– 32 [Google Scholar]
• Brewer MB , Gaertner SL . 2001 . Strategies for reducing intergroup bias. Handbook of Social Psychology: Intergroup Processes RJ Brown, SL Gaertner 451– 513 Oxford: Blackwell Sci. [Google Scholar]
• Brown RJ , Turner JC . 1979 . The criss-cross categorization effect in intergroup discrimination. Br. J. Soc. Clinical Psychol. 18 : 371– 83 [Google Scholar]
• Cameron L , Rutland A . 2006 . Extended contact through story reading in school: reducing children's prejudice towards the disabled. J. Soc. Issues 62 : 469– 88 [Google Scholar]
• Cameron L , Rutland A , Brown RJ , Douch R . 2006 . Changing children's intergroup attitudes towards refugees: testing different models of extended contact. Child Dev. 77 : 1208– 19 [Google Scholar]
• Clunies-Ross G , O'Meara K . 1989 . Changing the attitudes of students towards peers with disabilities. Aust. Psychol. 24 : 273– 84 [Google Scholar]
• Cook SW . 1971 . The effect of unintended interracial contact upon racial interaction and attitude change Proj. No. 5–1320, Final Rep Washington, DC: U.S. Dep. Health Educ. Welfare [Google Scholar]
• Cook SW . 1978 . Interpersonal and attitudinal outcomes in cooperating interracial groups. J. Res. Dev. Educ. 12 : 97– 113 [Google Scholar]
• Cook SW . 1985 . Experimenting on social issues: the case of school desegregation. Am. Psychol. 40 : 452– 60 [Google Scholar]
• Crandall CS , Eshleman A , O'Brien LT . 2002 . Social norms and the expression and suppression of prejudice: the struggle for internalization. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 82 : 359– 78 [Google Scholar]
• Crandall CS , Stangor C . 2005 . Conformity and prejudice. On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years After Allport JF Dovidio, P Glick, LA Rudman 295– 309 Malden, MA: Blackwell Sci. [Google Scholar]
• Crisp RJ , Hewstone M . 1999 . Differential evaluation of crossed category groups: patterns processes and reducing intergroup bias. Group Proc. Intergroup Relat. 2 : 303– 33 [Google Scholar]
• Crisp RJ , Hewstone M . 2007 . Multiple social categorization. Adv. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 39 : 163– 254 [Google Scholar]
• Crosby F , Bromley S , Saxe L . 1980 . Recent unobtrusive studies of Black and White discrimination and prejudice: a literature review. Psychol. Bull. 87 : 546– 63 [Google Scholar]
• Dasgupta N , Greenwald AG . 2001 . On the malleability of automatic attitudes: combating automatic prejudice with images of admired and disliked individuals. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 81 : 800– 14 [Google Scholar]
• Deutsch M . 1949 . A theory of co-operation and competition. Hum. Relat. 2 : 129– 52 [Google Scholar]
• Devine PG . 1989 . Stereotypes and prejudice: their automatic and controlled components. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 56 : 5– 18 [Google Scholar]
• Dobbs M , Crano WD . 2001 . Outgroup accountability in the minimal group paradigm: implications for aversive discrimination and social identity theory. Personal. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 27 : 355– 64 [Google Scholar]
• Dovidio JF , Gaertner SL , Validzic A , Matoka K , Johnson B , Frazier S . 1997 . Extending the benefits of recategorization: evaluations, self-disclosure, and helping. J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 33 : 401– 20 [Google Scholar]
• Druckman JN , Nelson KR . 2003 . Framing and deliberation: how citizens' conversations limit elite influence. Am. J. Pol. Sci. 474 : 729– 45 [Google Scholar]
• Duncan JG , Boisjoly J , Levy DM , Kremer M , Eccles J . 2003 . Empathy or Antipathy? The Consequences of Racially and Socially Diverse Peers on Attitudes and Behaviors Work. Pap., Inst. Policy Res., Northwestern Univ. Chicago, IL: [Google Scholar]
• Eagly A , Mladinic A . 1994 . Are people prejudiced against women? Some answers from research on attitudes, gender stereotypes, and judgments of competence. European Review of Social Psychology W Stroebe, M Hewstone 5 1– 35 New York: Wiley [Google Scholar]
• Eisenstadt D , Leippe MR , Rivers JA , Stambush MA . 2003 . Counterattitudinal advocacy on a matter of prejudice: effects of distraction commitment and personal importance. J. Appl. Soc. Psychol. 33 : 10 2123– 52 [Google Scholar]
• Ellis C , Sonnenfield JA . 1994 . Diverse approaches to managing diversity. Hum. Res. Manag. 33 : 79– 109 [Google Scholar]
• Environics Res. Group Ltd 2001 . Citizenship Advertising Campaign “Canada: We All Belong.” PN5048 contract 6C501-010874/001/CB Communication Canada [Google Scholar]
• Esses VM , Dovidio JF . 2002 . The role of emotions in determining willingness to engage in intergroup contact. Personal. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 289 : 1202– 14 [Google Scholar]
• Fein S , Spencer SJ . 1997 . Prejudice as self-image maintenance: affirming the self through derogating others. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 73 : 31– 44 [Google Scholar]
• Festinger LA . 1957 . A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press 291 [Google Scholar]
• Fisher FL . 1968 . Influences of reading and discussion on the attitudes of fifth graders toward American Indians. J. Educ. Res. 623 : 130– 34 [Google Scholar]
• Flores G , Gee D , Kastner B . 2000 . The teaching of cultural issues in US and Canadian medical schools. Acad. Med. 75 : 451– 55 [Google Scholar]
• Gaertner SL , Dovidio JF . 2000 . Reducing Intergroup Bias: The Common Ingroup Identity Model Philadelphia, PA: Psychol. Press 212 [Google Scholar]
• Gaertner SL , Dovidio JF , Rust MC , Nier J , Banker B , Ward CM . 1999 . Reducing intergroup bias: elements of intergroup cooperation. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 76 : 388– 402 [Google Scholar]
• Galinsky AD , Moskowitz GB . 2000 . Perspective taking: decreasing stereotype expression, stereotype accessibility, and in-group favoritism. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 784 : 708– 24 [Google Scholar]
• Gardiner GS . 1972 . Complexity training and prejudice reduction. J. Appl. Soc. Psychol. 2 : 326– 42 [Google Scholar]
• Gerber AS , Green DP , Kaplan EH . 2004 . The illusion of learning from observational research. Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics I Shapiro, R Smith, T Massoud 251– 73 New York: Cambridge Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Gerrig RJ . 1993 . Experiencing Narrative Worlds New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press 294 [Google Scholar]
• Gilliam FD Jr , Iyengar S . 2000 . Prime suspects: the impact of local television news on the viewing public. Am. J. Polit. Sci. 44 : 560– 73 [Google Scholar]
• Gray DB , Ashmore RD . 1975 . Comparing the effects of informational role-playing and value-discrepant treatments of racial attitudes. J. Appl. Soc. Psychol. 5 : 262– 81 [Google Scholar]
• Green DP , Wong JS . 2008 . Tolerance and the contact hypothesis: a field experiment. The Political Psychology of Democratic Citizenship E Borgida London: Oxford Univ. Press In press [Google Scholar]
• Greenwald AG , McGhee DE , Schwartz JKL . 1998 . Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: the implicit association test. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 74 : 1464– 80 [Google Scholar]
• Gurin P , Peng T , Lopez G , Nagda BR . 1999 . Context identity and intergroup relations. Cultural Divides: The Social Psychology of Intergroup Contact D Prentice, D Miller 133– 70 New York: Sage [Google Scholar]
• Gwinn CB . 1998 . The effect of multicultural literature on the attitudes of second-grade students. Unpubl. PhD dissert., Univ. Minn.
• Green MC , Brock TC . 2002 . In the mind's eye: transportation-imagery model of narrative persuasion. Narrative Impact MC Green, JJ Strange, TC Brock 315– 41 Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum [Google Scholar]
• Hafer C , Begue L . 2005 . Experimental research on just-world theory: problems, developments, and future challenges. Psychol. Bull. 1311 : 128– 67 [Google Scholar]
• Hanover JMB , Cellar DF . 1998 . Environmental factors and the effectiveness of workforce diversity training. Hum. Resour. Dev. Q. 9 : 105– 24 [Google Scholar]
• Hansen F . 2003 . Diversity's business case: doesn't add up. Workforce 824 : 28– 32 [Google Scholar]
• Haring TG , Breen C , Pitts-Conway V , Lee M . 1987 . Adolescent peer tutoring and special friend experiences. J. Assoc. Persons Severe Handicaps 12 : 280– 86 [Google Scholar]
• Hewstone M . 2000 . Contact and categorization: social psychological interventions to change intergroup relations. Stereotypes and Prejudice: Essential Readings C Stangor 394– 418 New York: Psychol. Press [Google Scholar]
• Hornsey M , Hogg M . 2000a . Intergroup similarity and subgroup relations: some implications for assimilation. Personal. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 268 : 948– 58 [Google Scholar]
• Hornsey M , Hogg M . 2000b . Assimilation and diversity: an integrative model of subgroup relations. Personal. Soc. Psychol. Rev. 42 : 143– 56 [Google Scholar]
• Houlette M , Gaertner SL , Johnson KS , Banker BS , Riek BM , Dovidio JM . 2004 . Developing a more inclusive social identity: an elementary school intervention. J. Soc. Issues 601 : 35– 55 [Google Scholar]
• Hughes JM , Bigler RS , Levy SR . 2007 . Consequences of learning about historical racism among European American and African American children. Child Dev. 78 : 1689– 705 [Google Scholar]
• Jackman MR . 1994 . The Velvet Glove: Paternalism and Conflict in Gender Class and Race Relations Berkeley, CA: Univ. Calif. Press 425 [Google Scholar]
• Johnson DW , Johnson RT . 1989 . Cooperation and Competition: Theory and Research Edina, MN: Interaction Book Co 265 [Google Scholar]
• Judd CM , Park B , Ryan CS , Brauer M , Kraus S . 1995 . Stereotypes and ethnocentrism: diverging interethnic perceptions of African American and White American youth. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 69 : 460– 81 [Google Scholar]
• Karpinski A , Hilton JL . 2001 . Attitudes and the Implicit Association Test. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 81 : 774– 78 [Google Scholar]
• Katz P . 2000 . Research summary. Intergroup Relations Among Youth: Summary of a Research Workshop New York: Carnegie Corp. [Google Scholar]
• Katz PA , Zalk SR . 1978 . Modification of children's racial attitudes. Dev. Psychol. 145 : 447– 61 [Google Scholar]
• Kawakami K , Dovidio JF , Moll J , Hermsen S , Russin A . 2000a . Just say no to stereotyping: effects of training in trait negation on stereotype activation. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 78 : 871– 88 [Google Scholar]
• Kawakami K , Phills CE , Steele JR , Dovidio JF . 2000b . Close distance makes the heart grow fonder: improving implicit racial attitudes and interracial interactions through approach behaviors. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 926 : 957– 71 [Google Scholar]
• Kelman HC , Fisher RJ . 2003 . Conflict analysis and resolution. Political Psychology DO Sears, L Huddy, R Jervis 315– 56 London: Oxford Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Kiselica MS , Maben P . 1999 . Do multicultural education and diversity training appreciation training reduce prejudice among counseling trainees?. J. Ment. Health Couns. 213– 40 [Google Scholar]
• Kuklinski JH , Hurley NL . 1996 . It's a matter of interpretation. Political Persuasion and Attitude Change D Mutz, P Sniderman, R Brody 125– 44 Ann Arbor: Mich. Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Kulik CT , Perry EL , Bourhis AC . 2000 . Ironic evaluation processes: effects of thought suppression on evaluations of older job applicants. J. Org. Behav. 21 : 689– 711 [Google Scholar]
• Landis D , Day HR , McGrew PL , Thomas JA , Miller AB . 1976 . Can a black “culture assimilator” increase racial understanding?. J. Soc. Issues 32 : 169– 83 [Google Scholar]
• Levy SR . 1999 . Reducing prejudice: lessons from social-cognitive factors underlying perceiver differences in prejudice. J. Soc. Issues 55 : 745– 65 [Google Scholar]
• Levy SR , Stroessner S , Dweck CS . 1998 . Stereotype formation and endorsement: the role of implicit theories. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 74 : 421– 36 [Google Scholar]
• Levy SR , West TL , Ramirez LF , Pachankis JE . 2004 . Racial and ethnic prejudice among children. The Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination: Racism in America 1 J Chin 37– 60 Westport, CT: Praeger Publ. [Google Scholar]
• Liebkind K , McAlister AL . 1999 . Extended contact through peer modelling to promote tolerance in Finland. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 295–6 : 765– 80 [Google Scholar]
• Lustig I . 2003 . The influence of studying foreign conflicts on students' perceptions of the Israeli Palestinian conflict Unpubl. master's thesis: Univ. Haifa, Israel [Google Scholar]
• Maass A . 1999 . Linguistic intergroup bias: stereotype perpetuation through language. Adv. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 31 : 79– 121 [Google Scholar]
• Marcus-Newhall A , Miller N , Holtz R , Brewer MB . 1993 . Cross-cutting category membership with role assignment: a means of reducing intergroup bias. Br. J. Soc. Psychol. 32 : 125– 46 [Google Scholar]
• Mays L , Henderson EH , Seidman SK , Steiner VJ . 1975 . An Evaluation Report on Vegetable Soup: The Effects of a Multi-Ethnic Children's Television Series on Intergroup Attitudes of Children Dept. Educ. Albany, NY: [Google Scholar]
• McAlister A , Ama E , Barroso C , Peters RJ , Kelder S . 2000 . Promoting tolerance and moral engagement through peer modeling. Cultur. Divers. Ethnic Minor. Psychol. 64 : 363– 73 [Google Scholar]
• McCauley C , Wright M , Harris M . 2000 . Diversity workshops on campus: a survey of current practice at U.S. colleges and universities. Coll. Student J. 34 : 100– 14 [Google Scholar]
• Mendelberg T . 2001 . The Race Card Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Miller N , Brewer MB . 1986 . Categorization effects on ingroup and outgroup perception. Prejudice Discrimination and Racism JF Dovidio, SL Gaertner 209– 230 Orlando, FL: Academic [Google Scholar]
• Miller N , Harrington HJ . 1990 . A model of social category salience for intergroup relations: empirical tests of relevant variables. European Perspectives in Psychology R Takens 205– 20 New York: Wiley [Google Scholar]
• Monteith MJ , Deneen NE , Tooman G . 1996 . The effect of social norm activation on the expression on opinions concerning gay men and blacks. Basic Appl. Soc. Psychol. 18 : 267– 88 [Google Scholar]
• Monteith MJ , Sherman J , Devine PG . 1998 . Suppression as a stereotype control strategy. Personal. Soc. Psychol. Rev. 2 : 3– 82 [Google Scholar]
• Monteith MJ , Zuwerink JR , Devine PG . 1994 . Prejudice and prejudice reduction: classic challenges contemporary approaches. Social Cognition: Impact on Social Psychology PG Devine, DL Hamilton 323– 46 San Diego, CA: Academic [Google Scholar]
• Morris L , Romero J , Tan DL . 1996 . Changes in attitude after diversity training. Training Dev. 509 : 54– 55 [Google Scholar]
• Mullen B , Migdal M , Hewstone M . 2001 . Crossed categorization versus simple categorization and intergroup evaluations: a meta-analysis. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 31 : 721– 36 [Google Scholar]
• Nagda B , Kim C , Truelove Y . 2004 . Learning about difference: learning with others, learning to transgress. J. Soc. Issues 60 : 195– 214 [Google Scholar]
• Nagda B , Zúñiga X . 2003 . Fostering meaningful racial engagement through intergroup dialogues. Group Process Intergr. 6 : 111– 28 [Google Scholar]
• Nier JA , Gaertner SL , Dovidio JF , Banker BS , Ward CM , Rust MC . 2001 . Changing interracial evaluations and behavior: the effects of a common group identity. Group Process Interg. 44 : 299– 316 [Google Scholar]
• Olson MA , Fazio RH . 2008 . Reducing automatically activated racial prejudice through implicit evaluative conditioning. Personal. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 32 : 421– 33 [Google Scholar]
• Oskamp S . 2000 . Reducing Prejudice and Discrimination Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum 370 [Google Scholar]
• Pagtolun-An IM , Clair JM . 1986 . An experimental study of attitudes toward homosexuality. Dev. Behav. 7 : 121– 35 [Google Scholar]
• Paluck EL . 2006a . Diversity training and intergroup contact: a call to action research. J. Soc. Issues 623 : 439– 51 [Google Scholar]
• Paluck EL . 2006b . Peer pressure against prejudice: a field experimental test of a national high school prejudice reduction program Work. Pap., Harvard Univ. Cambridge, MA: [Google Scholar]
• Paluck EL . 2008 . Reducing intergroup prejudice and conflict using the media: a field experiment in Rwanda. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. In press [Google Scholar]
• Paluck EL , Green DP . 2008 . Deference dissent and dispute resolution: a field experiment on a mass media intervention in Rwanda Work. Pap., Harvard Univ. Cambridge, MA: [Google Scholar]
• Pedersen A , Walker I , Wise M . 2005 . “Talk does not cook rice”: beyond antiracism rhetoric to strategies for social action. Aust. Psychol. 401 : 20– 30 [Google Scholar]
• Pettigrew TF , Tropp LR . 2006 . A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 90 : 751– 83 [Google Scholar]
• Powers DA , Ellison CG . 1995 . Interracial contact and black racial attitudes: the contact hypothesis and selectivity bias. Soc. Forces 74 : 205– 26 [Google Scholar]
• Price EG , Beach MC , Gary TL , Robinson KA , Gozu A , Palacio A . 2005 . A systematic review of the methodological rigor of studies evaluating cultural competence training of health professionals. Acad. Med. 806 : 579– 86 [Google Scholar]
• Puma MJ , Jones CC , Rock D , Fernandez R . 1993 . Prospects: The congressionally mandated study of educational growth and opportunity. Interim rep. Bethesda, MD: Abt Assoc. [Google Scholar]
• Rich Y , Kedem P , Shlesinger A . 1995 . Enhancing intergroup relations among children: a field test of the Miller-Brewer model. Int. J. Intercult. Relat. 194 : 539– 53 [Google Scholar]
• Roberts K . 2000 . Toward Competent Communities: Best Practices for Producing Community-Wide Study Circles Lexington, KY: Topsfield Found. [Google Scholar]
• Rokeach M . 1971 . Long-range experimental modification of values attitudes and behavior. Am. Psychol. 26 : 453– 59 [Google Scholar]
• Rokeach M . 1973 . The Nature of Human Values New York: Free Press [Google Scholar]
• Roseth C , Johnson D , Johnson R . 2008 . Promoting early adolescents' achievement and peer relationships: the effects of cooperative competitive and individualistic goal structures. Psychol. Bull. 1342 : 223– 46 [Google Scholar]
• Rothbart M , John OP . 1985 . Social categorization and behavioral episodes: a cognitive analysis of the effects of intergroup contact. J. Soc. Issues 413 : 81– 104 [Google Scholar]
• Rudman LA , Ashmore RD , Gary ML . 2001 . “Unlearning” automatic biases: the malleability of implicit prejudice and stereotypes. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 815 : 856– 68 [Google Scholar]
• Ruiz-Belda MA , Fernandez-Dols JM , Carrera P , Barchard K . 2003 . Spontaneous facial expressions of happy bowlers and soccer fans. Cogn. Emot. 17 : 315– 26 [Google Scholar]
• Schaller M , Asp CH , Rosell MC , Heim SJ . 1996 . Training in statistical reasoning inhibits the formation of erroneous group stereotypes. Personal. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 22 : 829– 44 [Google Scholar]
• Sears DO . 1986 . College sophomores in the laboratory: influences of a narrow data-base on social psychology's view of human nature. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 51 : 515– 30 [Google Scholar]
• Sears DO . 1988 . Symbolic racism. Handbook of Social Psychology G. Lindzey, E Aronson 5 315– 458 Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, Rev. ed.. [Google Scholar]
• Selltiz C , Cook S . 1948 . Can research in social science be both socially meaningful and scientifically useful?. Am. Soc. Rev. 13 : 454– 59 [Google Scholar]
• Shadish WR , Cook TD , Campbell DT . 2002 . Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference Boston: Houghton-Mifflin 623 [Google Scholar]
• Sherif M , Harvey OJ , White BJ , Hood WR , Sherif CW . 1961 . Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment Norman: Univ. Oklahoma Book Exchange 263 [Google Scholar]
• Sidanius J , Pratto F . 1999 . Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression New York: Cambridge Univ. Press 416 [Google Scholar]
• Sinclair L , Kunda Z . 1999 . Reactions to a Black professional: motivated inhibition and activation of conflicting stereotypes. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 77 : 885– 904 [Google Scholar]
• Slavin RE , Leavey MB , Madden NA . 1984 . Combining cooperative learning and individualized instruction: effects on student mathematics achievement, attitudes, and behaviors. Element. Sch. J. 84 : 409– 22 [Google Scholar]
• Slone M , Tarrasch R , Hallis D . 2000 . Ethnic stereotypic attitudes among Israeli children: two intervention programs. Merrill-Palmer Q. 46 : 370– 89 [Google Scholar]
• Smith E. 1993 . Social identity and social emotions: towards new conceptualizations of prejudice. Affect, Cognition, and Stereotyping D Mackie, D Hamilton 297– 315 New York: Academic [Google Scholar]
• Sniderman PM , Piazza T . 1993 . The Scar of Race Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press [Google Scholar]
• Son Hing LS , Li W , Zanna MP . 2002 . Inducing hypocrisy to reduce prejudicial responses among aversive racists. J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 381 : 71– 78 [Google Scholar]
• Stangor C , Sechrist GB , Jost JT . 2001 . Changing racial beliefs by providing consensus information. Personal. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 27 : 484– 94 [Google Scholar]
• Steele CM . 1998 . The psychology of self-affirmation: sustaining the integrity of the self. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 21: Social Psychological Studies of the Self: Perspectives and Programs L Berkowitz 261– 302 San Diego, CA: Academic [Google Scholar]
• Stephan WG . 1999 . Reducing Prejudice and Stereotyping in Schools New York: Teachers Coll. Press 142 [Google Scholar]
• Stephan WG , Finlay K . 1999 . The role of empathy in improving intergroup relations. J. Soc. Issues 554 : 729– 44 [Google Scholar]
• Stephan WG , Stephan CW . 1984 . The role of ignorance in intergroup relations. Groups in Contact: The Psychology of Desegregation N Miller, MB Brewer 229– 57 Orlando, FL: Academic [Google Scholar]
• Stephan WG , Stephan CW . 2001 . Improving Intergroup Relations Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage 360 [Google Scholar]
• Sternberg RJ . 2003 . A duplex theory of hate: development and application to terrorism massacres and genocide. Rev. Gen. Psychol. 73 : 299– 328 [Google Scholar]
• Stevenson MR . 1988 . Promoting tolerance for homosexuality: an evaluation of intervention strategies. J. Sex Res. 254 : 500– 11 [Google Scholar]
• Stewart TL , LaDuke JR , Bracht C , Sweet BAM , Gamarel KE . 2003 . Do the “eyes” have it? A program evaluation of Jane Elliot's “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” diversity training exercise. J. Appl. Soc. Psychol. 339 : 1898– 921 [Google Scholar]
• Strange JL. 2002 . How fictional tales wag real-world beliefs. Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations MC Green, J Strange, T Brock 263– 86 Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum [Google Scholar]
• Tajfel H . 1970 . Experiments in intergroup discrimination. Sci. Am. 223 : 96– 102 [Google Scholar]
• Towles-Schwen T , Fazio RH . 2006 . Automatically activated racial attitudes as predictors of the success of interracial roommate relationships. J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 42 : 698– 705 [Google Scholar]
• van Wieringen JCM , Schulpen TWJ , Kuyvenhoven MM . 2001 . Intercultural training of medical students. Med. Teach. 23 : 80– 82 [Google Scholar]
• Vescio TK , Judd CM , Kwan VSY . 2004 . Categorization and intergroup bias in crossed contexts: evidence of reductions in the strength of categorization but not intergroup bias. J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 40 : 478– 96 [Google Scholar]
• Vescio TK , Sechrist GB , Paolucci MP . 2003 . Perspective taking and prejudice reduction: the mediational role of empathy arousal and situational attributions European. J. Soc. Psychol. 33 : 455– 72 [Google Scholar]
• Warring DW , Johnson D , Maruyama G , Johnson R . 1985 . Impact of different types of cooperative learning on cross-ethnic and cross-sex relationships. J. Educ. Psychol. 77 : 53– 59 [Google Scholar]
• Wham MA , Barnhart J , Cook G . 1996 . Enhancing multicultural awareness through the storybook reading experience. J. Res. Dev. Educ. 301 : 1– 9 [Google Scholar]
• Wikfors EL. 1998 . Effects of a disabilities awareness workshop: employees' knowledge attitude and interaction. PhD dissert., Univ. Florida. Dissert. Abstracts Int. 58 : 2495 [Google Scholar]
• Wilder DA . 1986 . Social categorization: implications for creation and reduction of intergroup bias. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 19 L Berkowitz 239– 355 New York: Academic [Google Scholar]
• Wittenbrink B , Judd CM , Park B . 2001 . Spontaneous prejudice in context: variability in automatically activated attitudes. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 81 : 815– 27 [Google Scholar]
• Wright SC , Aron A , McLaughlin-Volpe T , Ropp SA . 1997 . The extended contact effect: knowledge of cross-group friendships and prejudice. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 73 : 73– 90 [Google Scholar]
• Yawkey TD . 1973 . Attitudes toward Black Americans held by rural and urban white early childhood subjects based upon multi-ethnic social studies materials. J. Negro Educ. 42 : 164– 69 [Google Scholar]

Data & Media loading...

Supplementary Data

Download Supplemental Table 1 (PDF).

• Article Type: Review Article

Most Read This Month

Most cited most cited rss feed, job burnout, executive functions, social cognitive theory: an agentic perspective, on happiness and human potentials: a review of research on hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, sources of method bias in social science research and recommendations on how to control it, mediation analysis, missing data analysis: making it work in the real world, grounded cognition, personality structure: emergence of the five-factor model, motivational beliefs, values, and goals.

Information

• Author Services

Initiatives

You are accessing a machine-readable page. In order to be human-readable, please install an RSS reader.

All articles published by MDPI are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. No special permission is required to reuse all or part of the article published by MDPI, including figures and tables. For articles published under an open access Creative Common CC BY license, any part of the article may be reused without permission provided that the original article is clearly cited. For more information, please refer to https://www.mdpi.com/openaccess .

Feature papers represent the most advanced research with significant potential for high impact in the field. A Feature Paper should be a substantial original Article that involves several techniques or approaches, provides an outlook for future research directions and describes possible research applications.

Feature papers are submitted upon individual invitation or recommendation by the scientific editors and must receive positive feedback from the reviewers.

Editor’s Choice articles are based on recommendations by the scientific editors of MDPI journals from around the world. Editors select a small number of articles recently published in the journal that they believe will be particularly interesting to readers, or important in the respective research area. The aim is to provide a snapshot of some of the most exciting work published in the various research areas of the journal.

Original Submission Date Received: .

• Active Journals
• Find a Journal
• Proceedings Series
• For Authors
• For Reviewers
• For Editors
• For Librarians
• For Publishers
• For Societies
• For Conference Organizers
• Open Access Policy
• Institutional Open Access Program
• Special Issues Guidelines
• Editorial Process
• Research and Publication Ethics
• Article Processing Charges
• Testimonials
• Preprints.org
• SciProfiles
• Encyclopedia

Article Menu

• Subscribe SciFeed
• Recommended Articles
• Google Scholar
• on Google Scholar
• Table of Contents

Find support for a specific problem in the support section of our website.

Please let us know what you think of our products and services.

Visit our dedicated information section to learn more about MDPI.

JSmol Viewer

Detection of hate speech, racism and misogyny in digital social networks: colombian case study.

1. Introduction

2. material and methods, 2.1. background.

2.2. Methodology

2.2.1. phase 1: initial model selection and evaluation, 2.2.2. phase 2: pre-training with gold standard, 2.2.3. phase 3: comparison with gpt models, 3.1. dataset 1: amazon reviews multilanguage, 3.2. dataset 2: semeval and hateval, 3.3. dataset 3: colombian context hs, rs and ms (gold standard), pre-processing, 4.1. selection of models, 4.2. definitions of hyperparameters, 4.2.1. algorithm of optimization, 4.2.2. fine-tuning strategy, 5.1. validation of results, 5.2. practical implications, 5.3. threats to validity, 6. discussion, 7. conclusions, 8. future works, author contributions, data availability statement, acknowledgments, conflicts of interest, abbreviations.

• Ash Turner. How Many Users Does Twitter Have? Available online: https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-users-does-twitter-have (accessed on 15 November 2023).
• LibertiesEU. Freedom of Expression on Social Media: Filtering Methods, Rights, and Future Perspectives. Available online: https://www.liberties.eu/es/stories/libertad-expresion-redes-sociales/43773 (accessed on 25 May 2023).
• Zhang, Z.; Luo, L. Hate Speech Detection: A Solved Problem? The Challenging Case of Long Tail on Twitter. arXiv 2018 . [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Pamungkas, E.W.; Basile, V.; Patti, V. Misogyny Detection in Twitter: A Multilingual and Cross-Domain Study. Inf. Process. Manag. 2020 , 57 , 102360. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• International Telecommunication Union, ITU Publications. Measuring Digital Development: Facts and Figures 2022. Available online: https://www.itu.int/hub/publication/d-ind-ict_mdd-2022/ (accessed on 5 April 2024).
• Wiegand, M.; Siegel, M.; Ruppenhofer, J. Overview of the GermEval 2018 Shared Task on the Identification of Offensive Language. In Proceedings of the GermEval 2018, 14th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2018), Vienna, Austria, 21 September 2018. [ Google Scholar ]
• Council Europe. Initiatives, Policies, Strategies. Available online: https://www.coe.int/en/web/cyberviolence/-/european-commission-the-eu-code-of-conduct-on-countering-illegal-hate-speech-online (accessed on 4 January 2024).
• Simon Kemp. Digital 2022: Global Overview Report. Available online: https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2022-global-overview-report (accessed on 14 May 2024).
• Semana Magazine: New Campaign against Cyberbullying Launched in Colombia. Available online: https://www.semana.com/economia/empresas/articulo/lanzan-nueva-campana-contra-el-ciberbullying-en-colombia/202245/ (accessed on 15 December 2023).
• Federation of Progressive Women; Government of Spain. Information Guide on Gender-Based Hate Crimes and Cyber-Violations. Available online: https://plataformavoluntariado.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/guia-ciberacoso-fmp-2020-1.pdf (accessed on 19 November 2023).
• Plaza-del-Arco, F.M.; Molina-González, M.D.; Ureña-López, L.A.; Martín-Valdivia, M.T. Integrating implicit and explicit linguistic phenomena via multi-task learning for offensive language detection. Knowl.-Based Syst. 2022 , 258 , 109965. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Wiegand, M.; Ruppenhofer, J.; Kleinbauer, T. Detection of Abusive Language: The Problem of Biased Datasets. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers) ; Association for Computational Linguistics: Minneapolis, MN, USA, 2019; pp. 602–608. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Zampieri, M.; Malmasi, S.; Nakov, P.; Rosenthal, S.; Farra, N.; Kumar, R. Predicting the Type and Target of Offensive Posts in Social Media. In Proceedings of the 2019 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), Minneapolis, MN, USA, 2–7 June 2019; pp. 1415–1420. [ Google Scholar ]
• Kogilavani, S.V.; Malliga, S.; Jaiabinaya, K.R.; Malini, M.; Kokila, M.M. Characterization and mechanical properties of offensive language taxonomy and detection techniques. Mater. Today Proc. 2023 , 81 , 630–633. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• United Nations. What Is Hate Speech? Available online: https://www.un.org/en/hate-speech/understanding-hate-speech/what-is-hate-speech (accessed on 21 March 2021).
• Oxford Dictionaries. Misogyny. Available online: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/misogyny?q=misogyny (accessed on 8 March 2023).
• Royal Spanish Academy. Misogyny. Available online: https://dle.rae.es/misoginia (accessed on 10 March 2023).
• Royal Spanish Academy. Racism. Available online: https://dle.rae.es/racismo?m=form (accessed on 10 March 2023).
• Rodríguez-Sánchez, F.; Carrillo-de-Albornoz, J.; Plaza, L. Automatic Classification of Sexism in Social Networks: An Empirical Study on Twitter Data. IEEE Access 2020 , 8 , 219563–219576. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Council Europe. No Space for Violence against Women and Girls in the Digital World. Available online: https://www.coe.int/en/web/commissioner/-/no-space-for-violence-against-women-and-girls-in-the-digital-world (accessed on 17 October 2023).
• Qureshi, K.A.; Sabih, M. Un-Compromised Credibility: Social Media Based Multi-Class Hate Speech Classification for Text. IEEE Access 2021 , 9 , 109465–109477. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• X. Hateful Conduct. Available online: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-conduct-policy (accessed on 26 April 2022).
• Youtube. Hate Speech Policy. Available online: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2801939?hl=en (accessed on 14 February 2023).
• Mutanga, R.T.; Naicker, N.; Olugbara, O.O. Hate Speech Detection in Twitter using Transformer Methods. Int. J. Adv. Comput. Sci. Appl. 2020 , 11 , 9. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Sukhbaatar, S.; Weston, J.; Fergus, R. End-to-end memory networks. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2015), Montreal, QC, Canada, 7–12 December 2015; pp. 2440–2448. [ Google Scholar ]
• Vaswani, A.; Shazeer, N.; Parmar, N.; Uszkoreit, J.; Jones, L.; Gomez, A.N.; Kaiser, Ł.; Polosukhin, I. Attention is all you need. In Proceedings of the Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (NIPS 2017), Long Beach, CA, USA, 4–8 December 2017. [ Google Scholar ]
• Raquel Martín. What Languages Are Most Used on the Internet? Available online: https://forbes.es/listas/5184/que-lenguas-son-las-mas-utilizadas-en-internet/ (accessed on 8 March 2024).
• Mansur, Z.; Omar, N.; Tiun, S. Twitter Hate Speech Detection: A Systematic Review of Methods, Taxonomy Analysis, Challenges, and Opportunities. IEEE Access 2023 , 11 , 16226–16249. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Salminen, J.; Hopf, M.; Chowdhury, S.A.; Jung, S.G.; Almerekhi, H.; Jansen, B.J. Developing an online hate classifier for multiple social media platforms. Hum.-Centric Comput. Inf. Sci. 2020 , 10 , 1. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Djuric, N.; Zhou, J.; Morris, R.; Grbovic, M.; Radosavljevic, V.; Bhamidipati, N. Hate Speech Detection with Comment Embeddings. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW ’15 Companion), New York, NY, USA, 18–22 May 2015; pp. 29–30. [ Google Scholar ]
• Watanabe, H.; Bouazizi, M.; Ohtsuki, T. Hate Speech on Twitter: A Pragmatic Approach to Collect Hateful and Offensive Expressions and Perform Hate Speech Detection. IEEE Access 2018 , 6 , 13825–13835. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Sindhu, A.; Sarang, S.; Zahid, H.; Zafar, A.; Sajid, K.; Ghulam, M. Automatic Hate Speech Detection using Machine Learning: A Comparative Study. Int. J. Adv. Comput. Sci. Appl. 2020 , 11 . [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Badjatiya, P.; Gupta, S.; Gupta, M.; Varma, V. Deep Learning for Hate Speech Detection in Tweets. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion (WWW ’17 Companion), Perth, Austria, 3–7 April 2017; pp. 759–760. [ Google Scholar ]
• Al-Hassan, A.; Al-Dossari, H. Detection of hate speech in Arabic tweets using deep learning. Multimed. Syst. 2022 , 28 , 1963–1974. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Pitsilis, G.K.; Ramampiaro, H.; Langseth, H. Effective hate-speech detection in Twitter data using recurrent neural networks. Applied Intelligence 2018 , 48 , 4730–4742. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Plaza-del-Arco, F.M.; Molina-González, M.D.; Ureña-López, L.A.; Martín-Valdivia, M.T. Comparing pre-trained language models for Spanish hate speech detection. Expert Syst. Appl. 2021 , 166 , 114120. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Sohn, H.; Lee, H. MC-BERT4HATE: Hate Speech Detection using Multi-channel BERT for Different Languages and Translations. In Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW), Beijing, China, 8–11 November 2019; pp. 551–559. [ Google Scholar ]
• Cañete, J.; Chaperon, G.; Fuentes, R.; Ho, J.H.; Kang, H.; Pérez, J. Spanish Pre-Trained BERT Model and Evaluation Data. In Proceedings of the Practical ML for Developing Countries Workshop, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 26 April 2020. [ Google Scholar ]
• Pereira-Kohatsu, J.C.; Quijano-Sánchez, L.; Liberatore, F.; Camacho-Collados, M. Detecting and Monitoring Hate Speech in Twitter. Sensors 2019 , 19 , 4654. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Plaza-Del-Arco, F.M.; Molina-González, M.D.; Ureña-López, L.A.; Martín-Valdivia, M.T. Detecting Misogyny and Xenophobia in Spanish Tweets Using Language Technologies. ACM Trans. Int. Technol. 2020 , 20 , 1–19. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Gertner, A.; Henderson, J.; Merkhofer, E.; Marsh, A.; Wellner, B.; Zarrella, G. MITRE at SemEval-2019 Task 5: Transfer Learning for Multilingual Hate Speech Detection. In Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, Minneapolis, MN, USA, 6–7 June 2019; pp. 453–459. [ Google Scholar ]
• Vega, L.E.A.; Reyes-Magaña, J.C.; Gómez-Adorno, H.; Bel-Enguix, G. MineriaUNAM at SemEval-2019 Task 5: Detecting Hate Speech in Twitter using Multiple Features in a Combinatorial Framework. In Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, Minneapolis, MN, USA, 6–7 June 2019; pp. 447–452. [ Google Scholar ]
• Paetzold, G.H.; Zampieri, M.; Malmasi, S. UTFPR at SemEval-2019 Task 5: Hate Speech Identification with Recurrent Neural Networks. In Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, Minneapolis, MN, USA, 6–7 June 2019; pp. 519–523. [ Google Scholar ]
• Basile, V.; Bosco, C.; Fersini, E.; Nozza, D.; Patti, V.; Pardo, F.M.R.; Rosso, P.; Sanguinetti, M. SemEval-2019 Task 5: Multilingual Detection of Hate Speech Against Immigrants and Women in Twitter. In Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, Minneapolis, MN, USA, 6–7 June 2019; pp. 54–63. [ Google Scholar ]
• Wullach, T.; Adler, A.; Minkov, E. Towards Hate Speech Detection at Large via Deep Generative Modeling. IEEE Internet Comput. 2021 , 25 , 48–57. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Plaza del Arco, F.M.; Casavantes, M.; Escalante, J.H.; Martín-Valdivia, M.; Montejo-Ráez, A.; Montes-y-Gómez, M.; Jarquín-Vásquez, H.; Villaseñor-Pineda, L. Overview of MeOffendEs at IberLEF 2021: Offensive Language Detection in Spanish Variants. Proces. Del Leng. Nat. 2021 , 67 , 183–194. [ Google Scholar ]
• Gonzalo, J.; Montes-y-Gómez, M.; Rosso, P. IberLEF 2021 Overview: Natural Language Processing for Iberian Languages. In Proceedings of the Iberian Languages Evaluation Forum (IberLEF 2021), Malaga, Spain, 21 September 2021. [ Google Scholar ]
• Plaza-del-Arco, F.M.; Montejo-Raez, A.; Urena-López, L.A.; Martín-Valdivia, M.T. OffendES: A New Corpus in Spanish for Offensive Language Research. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021), Virtual Event, 1–3 September 2021; pp. 1096–1108. [ Google Scholar ]
• Wang, Z.; Xie, Q.; Feng, Y.; Ding, Z.; Yang, Z.; Xia, R. Is ChatGPT a good sentiment analyzer? A preliminary study. arXiv 2023 . [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Zhang, B.; Fu, X.; Ding, D.; Huang, H.; Li, Y.; Jing, L. Investigating chain-of-thought with ChatGPT for stance detection on social media. arXiv 2023 . [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Parikh, S.; Vohra, Q.; Tumbade, P.; Tiwari, M. Exploring zero and few-shot techniques for intent classification. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Toronto, ON, Canada, 10–12 July 2023; pp. 744–755. [ Google Scholar ]
• Lamichhane, B. Evaluation of ChatGPT for nlp-based mental health applications. arXiv 2023 . [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Chiu, K.L.; Collins, A.; Alexander, R. Detecting hate speech with GPT-3. arXiv 2021 . [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Bang, Y.; Cahyawijaya, S.; Lee, N.; Dai, W.; Su, D.; Wilie, B.; Lovenia, H.; Ji, Z.; Yu, T.; Chung, W.; et al. A multitask, multilingual, multimodal evaluation of ChatGPT on reasoning, hallucination, and interactivity. In Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Nusa Dua, Bali, 1–4 November 2023; pp. 675–718. [ Google Scholar ]
• Zhong, Q.; Ding, L.; Liu, J.; Du, B.; Tao, D. Can ChatGPT understand too? A comparative study on ChatGPT and fine-tuned bert. arXiv 2023 . [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Li, X.; Chan, S.; Zhu, X.; Pei, Y.; Ma, Z.; Liu, X.; Shah, S. Are ChatGPT and GPT-4 general-purpose solvers for financial text analytics? An examination on several typical tasks. arXiv 2023 . [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Tehseen, Z.; Akram, S.M.; Nawaz, M.S.; Shahzad, B.; Abdullatif, M.; Mustafa, U.R.; Lali, M.I. Identification of Hatred Speeches on Twitter. In Proceedings of the 52nd The IRES International Conference, Kuala Lumpur, Malasya, 5–6 November 2016; pp. 27–32. [ Google Scholar ]
• Zhou, Y.; Yang, Y.; Liu, H.; Liu, X.; Savage, N. Deep Learning Based Fusion Approach for Hate Speech Detection. IEEE Access 2020 , 8 , 128923–128929. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Gómez-Espinosa, V.; Muñiz-Sanchez, V.; López-Monroy, A.P. Transformers pipeline for offensiveness detection in Mexican Spanish social media. In Proceedings of the Iberian Languages Evaluation Forum (IberLEF 2021), Malaga, Spain, 21 September 2021; pp. 251–258. [ Google Scholar ]
• Aroyehun, S.T.; Gelbukh, A. Evaluation of intermediate pretraining for the detection of offensive language. In Proceedings of the Iberian Languages Evaluation Forum (IberLEF 2021), Malaga, Spain, 21 September 2021; pp. 313–328. [ Google Scholar ]
• Huerta-Velasco, D.A.; Calvo, H. Using lexical resources for detecting offensiveness in Mexican Spanish tweets. In Proceedings of the Iberian Languages Evaluation Forum (IberLEF 2021), Malaga, Spain, 21 September 2021; pp. 240–250. [ Google Scholar ]
• Sreelakshmi, K.; Premjith, B.; Soman, K. Transformer based offensive language identification in Spanish. In Proceedings of the Iberian Languages Evaluation Forum (IberLEF 2021), Malaga, Spain, 21 September 2021; pp. 233–239. [ Google Scholar ]
• Kalyan, K.S. A survey of GPT-3 family large language models including ChatGPT and GPT-4. Nat. Lang. Process. J. 2023 , 6 . [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• OpenAI; Achiam, J.; Adler, S.; Agarwal, S.; Ahmad, L.; Akkaya, I.; Aleman, F.L.; Almeida, D.; Altenschmidt, J.; Altman, S.; et al. GPT-4 Technical Report. arXiv 2023 , arXiv:2303.08774. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Ouyang, L.; Wu, J.; Jiang, X.; Almeida, D.; Wainwright, C.; Mishkin, P.; Zhang, C.; Agarwal, S.; Slama, K.; Ray, A.; et al. Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback. In Proceedings of the 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, New Oleans, LA, USA, 28 November–9 December 2024. [ Google Scholar ]
• Keung, P.; Lu, Y.; Szarvas, G.; Smith, N.A. The Multilingual Amazon Reviews Corpus. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Online, 16–20 November 2020; pp. 4563–4568. [ Google Scholar ]
• Mohammad, S.; Bravo-Marquez, F.; Salameh, M.; Kiritchenko, S. SemEval-2018 Task 1: Affect in Tweets. In Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, New Orleans, LA, USA, 5–6 June 2018. [ Google Scholar ]
• Zeman, D.; Martínez-Alonso, H. The Spanish Data for the anCora Corpus. Available online: https://github.com/UniversalDependencies/UD_Spanish-AnCora (accessed on 18 June 2024).
• Wolf, T.; Debut, L.; Sanh, V.; Chaumond, J.; Delangue, C.; Moi, A.; Cistac, P.; Rault, T.; Louf, R.; Funtowicz, M.; et al. Transformers: State-of-the-art natural language processing. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, Online, 16–20 November 2020; pp. 38–45. [ Google Scholar ]
• Pérez, J.M.; Rajngewerc, M.; Giudici, J.C.; Furman, D.A.; Luque, F.; Alemany, L.A.; Martínez, M.V. Pysentimiento: A Python Toolkit for Sentiment Analysis and Social NLP tasks. arXiv 2021 . [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Álvarez-Carmona, M.A.; Guzmán-Falcón, E.; Montes-y-Gómez, M.; Escalante, H.J.; Villaseñor-Pineda, L.; Reyes-Meza, V.; Rico-Sulayes, A. Overview of MEX-A3T at IberEval 2018: Authorship and aggressiveness analysis in Mexican Spanish tweets. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Evaluation of Human Language Technologies for Iberian Languages (IberEval 2018), Seville, Spain, 18 September 2018; pp. 74–96. [ Google Scholar ]
• Fersini, E.; Rosso, P.; Anzovino, M. Overview of the task on automatic misogyny identification at IberEval 2018. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Evaluation of Human Language Technologies for Iberian Languages (IberEval 2018), Seville, Spain, 18 September 2018; pp. 215–228. [ Google Scholar ]
• Waseem, Z.; Hovy, D. Hateful symbols or hateful people? In predictive features for hate speech detection on twitter. In Proceedings of the NAACL Student Research Workshop, San Diego, CA, USA, 16 June 2016; pp. 88–93. [ Google Scholar ]
• Bafna, P.B.; Saini, J.R. An Application of Zipf’s Law for Prose and Verse Corpora Neutrality for Hindi and Marathi Languages. Int. J. Adv. Comput. Sci. Appl. 2020 , 11 , 261–265. [ Google Scholar ] [ CrossRef ]
• Plaza-del-Arco, F.M.; Parras-Portillo, A.B.; López-Úbeda, P.; Gil, B.; Martín-Valdivia, M.T. SHARE: A Lexicon of Harmful Expressions by Spanish Speakers. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Marseille, France, 20–25 June 2022; pp. 1307–1316. [ Google Scholar ]
• Institute of Knowledge Engineering: Transformers in Natural Language Processing. Available online: https://www.iic.uam.es/innovacion/transformers-en-procesamiento (accessed on 19 June 2024).
• Kingma, D.P.; Ba, J. Adam: A method for stochastic optimization. In Proceedings of the Conference Paper at the 3rd International Conference for Learning Representations, San Diego, CA, USA, 7–9 May 2015; pp. 1–15. [ Google Scholar ]
• IBM. CRISP-DM Help Overview. Last Updated: 2021-08-17. Available online: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/spss-modeler/saas?topic=dm-crisp-help-overview (accessed on 29 June 2024).
• Goodfellow, I.; Bengio, Y.; Courville, A. Deep Learning ; MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, USA, 2016; pp. 1–800. ISBN 978-0262035613. [ Google Scholar ]
• Bergstra, J.; Bengio, Y. Random Search for Hyper-Parameter Optimization. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 2012 , 13 , 281–305. [ Google Scholar ]
• Smith, L.N. Cyclical Learning Rates for Training Neural Networks. In Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), Santa Rosa, CA, USA, 24–31 March 2017; pp. 464–472. [ Google Scholar ]
• Nabi, J. Hyper-Parameter Tuning Techniques in Deep Learning. Available online: https://towardsdatascience.com/hyper-parameter-tuning-techniques-in-deep-learning-4dad592c63c8 (accessed on 29 March 2024).
• Yu, F. A Comprehensive Guide to Fine-Tuning Deep Learning Models in Keras (Part I). Available online: https://flyyufelix.github.io/2016/10/03/fine-tuning-in-keras-part1 (accessed on 29 September 2023).

Click here to enlarge figure

Share and Cite

Moreno-Sandoval, L.G.; Pomares-Quimbaya, A.; Barbosa-Sierra, S.A.; Pantoja-Rojas, L.M. Detection of Hate Speech, Racism and Misogyny in Digital Social Networks: Colombian Case Study. Big Data Cogn. Comput. 2024 , 8 , 113. https://doi.org/10.3390/bdcc8090113

Moreno-Sandoval LG, Pomares-Quimbaya A, Barbosa-Sierra SA, Pantoja-Rojas LM. Detection of Hate Speech, Racism and Misogyny in Digital Social Networks: Colombian Case Study. Big Data and Cognitive Computing . 2024; 8(9):113. https://doi.org/10.3390/bdcc8090113

Moreno-Sandoval, Luis Gabriel, Alexandra Pomares-Quimbaya, Sergio Andres Barbosa-Sierra, and Liliana Maria Pantoja-Rojas. 2024. "Detection of Hate Speech, Racism and Misogyny in Digital Social Networks: Colombian Case Study" Big Data and Cognitive Computing 8, no. 9: 113. https://doi.org/10.3390/bdcc8090113

Article Metrics

Article access statistics, further information, mdpi initiatives, follow mdpi.

Subscribe to receive issue release notifications and newsletters from MDPI journals