Social Identity Theory

The videos we watched in class showed how in 1968, Jane Elliott, a teacher in a small, all-white Iowa town, divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and gave them a daring lesson in discrimination. Most of the children in the Class Divided exercise have been friends, playing around on the playground and getting along well.  The children accepted the views that their teacher gave them, that blue eyed people were superior then brown eyed people. This way, groups of power differences were created, and the class was split in half. Within minutes, the blue eyed kids started to work with this new fact, and discriminate. The children started calling the out-group "brown eyes" as an insult. They were teasing them, separating from them, and suggesting that if the brown eyed people get out of hand, to use a ruler to tame them. The effect was real. During recces, one of the brown eyed children felt so much hurt, and so put down by being in the worse group, that he hit one of his classmates - a kid he was probably a best friend with the day before. This exercise teaches us many lessons. It shows how hurtful, and real life prejudice and discrimination are, but it also shows many interesting psychological aspects of our behavior. The social identity theory as well as minimal group paradigm help explain what actually happened. The children were very easily convinced of their status. Their in-group - "we"- and their out-group - "them"- were clearly stated, and reacted upon. The blue eyed kids were the in-group, believing that they are similar to each-other, but that the out-group, the brown are kids, are all the same, and completely different form them. After all, they were told that blue eyed people were smarter, and better. After a while, the kids were pointing out these differences too. This resulted from their social comparison, and resulted in the outbursts that were clearly their way of showing positive distinctiveness. They pointed out the inter-group differentiation, and after a while, would clearly in-group favoritism. Everything the brown eyes did was because they were "stupid", and the brown eyes weren't fighting at all, they accepted their group and role. 

*This takes you through only one of the days of the experiment, the day when blue eyed people were on the top.