Jane Elliott is an educator whose famous blue eyes/brown eyes exercise showed social psychologists (and her students) the impact that racism has on education and how social psychology can be applied to real-world situations. In this lesson, we'll learn about the exercise and its impact on social psychology.

Jane Elliot

Jane Elliot was a white teacher from Iowa who wanted to help all men and women achieve equality.

In the 1960s, America was a country divided. The black civil rights movement had swept across the country, and as more and more African Americans fought for equality, many racists fought against them.

In the midst of this movement, Jane Elliott, a white teacher from a mostly white town in Iowa, watched as the world around her battled on the streets of cities like Atlanta, Chicago and Washington D.C. She, too, wanted to be involved in gaining equality for all men and women, regardless of race. But how?

And then, one night in April 1968, a shot rang out in Memphis, Tennessee. As Jane Elliott watched the media coverage of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., she felt appalled by the way the white reporters could not seem to understand what the black community was going through.

Elliott realized that the problem was the disconnect between what whites knew about racism and what blacks experienced. So, Elliott developed an exercise to change the way her white students thought about racism.

The Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise

One morning after King's assassination, Elliott informed her class that they were going to change the way things were done. Blue-eyed children were given pride of place in the classroom. They were given extra recess time, a second helping of food at lunch, and they were allowed to sit at the front of the classroom and participate in class discussions.

Brown-eyed children, meanwhile, were forced to sit at the back of the class and were more severely reprimanded for the same type of behavior that blue-eyed children got away with. Elliott even made up a scientific 'fact' that the melanin that caused blue eyes had been found to be linked with a higher intelligence.

The blue eyes/brown eyes exercise affected how students performed on assignments.

The results were stunning. By the end of the day, the blue-eyed children viciously put down the brown-eyed children. Not only that, but the quiet, struggling blue-eyed students did much better on class assignments, and the louder, successful brown-eyed students did not do as well.

The next day, Elliott reversed the exercise, promoting brown eyes as better than blue eyes. Much of the same results happened, though the brown-eyed students didn't taunt their blue-eyed classmates quite as viciously. By the end of the second day, when the exercise ended, the blue-eyed and brown-eyed children hugged and cried with each other. A class of all-white students had learned what racism felt like.

× Unlock Content Over 75,000 lessons in all major subjects Get access risk-free,

just create an account. Try it risk-free No obligation, cancel anytime. Want to learn more? Select a subject to preview related courses: Math

History

English

ACT/SAT

Science

Business

Psychology

AP