Description

Jane Elliott's blue eyes/brown eyes experiment reveals how prejudice forms in minutes. Learn the 5 psychological lessons not only every psychology student must know.

Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes, and Jane Elliott's A Class Divided: The Psychology Experiment That Changed How We Understand Prejudice

Introduction

In just one day, a third-grade teacher in Iowa forever changed the world's understanding of racism. Jane Elliot's groundbreaking classroom experiment in 1968 proved that prejudice is not innate, but learned, and learned alarmingly quickly.

This single experiment remains one of the 25 most influential experiments in the history of psychology. It is still taught in universities around the world because it reveals uncomfortable truths about human nature that no theory can convey. The experiment shows how quickly ordinary people can become cruel when society gives them permission to do so. It demonstrates how discrimination causes measurable harm to both the victim and the perpetrator.

This experiment is part of the training of every psychology student today. It connects abstract theory with harsh reality in a way that laboratory experiments rarely can. However, the findings from Elliott's teaching experiment can be applied to all areas of human behaviour, from workplace dynamics to social media interactions to political polarisation.

Elliott's work answered critical questions that psychologists are still grappling with today. How do prejudices arise so quickly? What psychological mechanisms underlie discriminatory behaviour? Why do some people resist prejudices while others adopt them immediately? And above all, can discrimination be unlearned as quickly as it was learned?

Understanding Elliot's experiment is not just an academic exercise, but a practical guide to recognising discrimination in everyday life. The experiment reveals both our capacity for cruelty and our potential for empathy.

What is Jane Elliot's ‘class division experiment’?

Jane Elliot's experiment, ‘A Class Divided,’ was a daring classroom exercise she began on 5 April 1968 in Riceville, Iowa, one day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Elliot, a third-grade teacher and later anti-racism activist, planned the experiment to teach her all-white students how discrimination feels.

The experiment was deceptively simple but psychologically sophisticated. Elliot divided her class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed students based on eye colour. This arbitrary physical characteristic became the basis for an artificial social hierarchy that completely transformed her class within a few hours.

On the first day, Elliott declared blue-eyed children to be superior beings. They were given extra privileges, including longer breaks, a second helping of lunch and permission to drink from the water cooler. Brown-eyed students were immediately restricted: they were not allowed to use the water cooler, had shorter breaks and had to wear fabric collars to make their ‘inferior’ status visible.

The results were immediately visible and shocking. Within a few hours, the ‘superior’ blue-eyed students became arrogant and self-confident about their academic performance. They achieved better test results, participated more in class discussions and began to bully their brown-eyed classmates with surprising cruelty. The ‘inferior’ brown-eyed children lost confidence dramatically, performed poorly at school and withdrew socially.

On the second day, Elliott completely reversed the roles. The brown-eyed students became the superior group, while the blue-eyed students now had minority status. However, new patterns of behaviour emerged even though different children were now playing the respective roles. This role reversal led to one of the most impressive moments of the experiment: genuine empathy arising from a shared experience.

This experiment yielded three crucial insights that revolutionised social psychology.

Firstly, social roles shape behaviour more strongly than individual personality traits.

Secondly, completely arbitrary distinctions become effective social dividing lines when legitimised by authority.

Thirdly, both privilege and discrimination have immediate, measurable psychological effects on cognitive performance and emotional well-being.

Elliott filmed the entire experiment, creating teaching material that is still fascinating decades later. The documentary shows viewers exactly how prejudices arise and spread through social systems. This video continues to be used in classrooms around the world to teach social psychology and the malleability of human behaviour, especially discrimination.

The psychological mechanisms behind the rapid adoption of prejudice

The speed of behavioural change in Elliott's classroom revealed fundamental and influential aspects of human psychology. The students did not develop discriminatory attitudes gradually, but within minutes of the group assignments being announced.

This rapid change illustrates what psychologists call the ‘minimal group paradigm’, the human tendency to favour one's own group, even when group membership is completely random. Our brains automatically categorise people into “us” and ‘them’ in order to process social information more quickly. This categorisation happens so quickly that we usually don't even notice it.

The distinction between eye colour has no logical connection to intelligence, character or abilities. Nevertheless, the students immediately accepted it as meaningful because it was presented as fact by an authority figure. This shows how social learning works in practice: children learn not only through direct instructions, but also by observing which behaviours are socially acceptable.

Within a few hours, Elliott's students adopted classic preferential treatment within their group. Children with blue eyes sat together at lunch as a matter of course, shared more with other blue-eyed students and spoke more positively about their group members, while criticising the brown-eyed ‘others’. These behaviours reflect real patterns of discrimination.

The experiment also showed how confirmation bias works. Once the students had accepted the eye colour hierarchy, they interpreted all subsequent events accordingly. When blue-eyed students performed well, it ‘confirmed’ their superiority. When brown-eyed students struggled, it ‘proved’ their inferiority, even though the performance differences were caused by the discriminatory treatment itself.

Understanding these psychological mechanisms helps explain current phenomena that confuse many people. Why do rivalries between sports teams sometimes escalate into violence? How do political divisions destroy long-standing friendships? Why do cliques form so quickly in the workplace, effectively excluding newcomers? Elliott's experiment provides the psychological framework for understanding these social dynamics.

Privilege, discrimination and academic performance

One of Elliott's most scientifically significant findings concerned the direct influence of social status on learning ability. This was not just about feelings or attitudes, but about measurable changes in academic performance that occurred within a few hours.

Blue-eyed students not only felt superior because of their privileged status. They also actually performed better on tasks. Their performance assessments improved significantly. Their participation in class increased dramatically. Their problem-solving skills increased. This illustrates a psychological concept according to which higher expectations already lead to improved performance (Pygmalion effect).

Conversely, brown-eyed students experienced what psychologists now call ‘stereotype threat’: fear and mental stress when others expect you to perform poorly because of your membership in a group. When Elliott told the brown-eyed students they were inferior, they began to behave in ways that confirmed this claim, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The originally privileged students exhibited the aforementioned Pygmalion effect (Rosenthal effect): when teachers expect students to succeed, they perform better, even if these expectations are based on completely meaningless factors. Elliott's preferential treatment boosted students' self-confidence and motivation, leading to genuine improvements in performance.

This is how discrimination in educational institutions creates real performance differences. Students from marginalised groups may not perform worse because of a lack of ability, but because of the psychological stress of struggling with negative stereotypes. At the same time, privileged students benefit from positive assumptions about their abilities and develop performance advantages that ‘justify’ the original discrimination.

The cycle reinforces itself: discrimination leads to performance differences that confirm discriminatory beliefs and invite further discrimination. Understanding this mechanism is important not only for psychology students who will work in educational, clinical or organisational settings.

Self-esteem and identity

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Elliott's experiment was how quickly confident, happy children became insecure and withdrawn. ‘Inferior’ students who had started the morning engaged and in good spirits experienced self-doubt and social isolation in the afternoon after just a few lessons.

This rapid change showed how fragile self-esteem is in children whose identities are still developing. 

The students in the ‘minority’ group internalised oppression. They adopted negative messages about their group and sometimes even criticised other disadvantaged students in order to distance themselves from their own inferiority.

Elliott documented specific behavioural indicators of damaged self-esteem that every psychology student now learns. These included reduced eye contact with authority figures, reluctance to participate in class discussions, observable changes in posture (slumped shoulders and lowered head), increased conflicts with other group members, and attempts to hide or downplay stigmatised characteristics.

The speed and severity of these psychological changes reflect what researchers have observed in other experiments on discrimination in the real world. Children from marginalised communities show similar patterns of reduced self-confidence at school, social withdrawal and internalised negative stereotypes about their identity groups. Real social problems can therefore be attributed to societal discrimination rather than individual pathology.

The experiment threatened identity fragmentation when central aspects of identity were linked to negative stereotypes. Psychological distress and even cognitive impairment are possible consequences. The disadvantaged students could not simply ignore their eye colour, which Elliott constantly highlighted as a sign of inferiority.

This lesson underscores the critical importance of early intervention. Psychological damage from discrimination occurs immediately and intensifies over time if it persists. Therapists working with clients from marginalised communities must also understand how social prejudices give rise to internalised shame and self-doubt.

Perspective taking and empathy

The second day of Elliott's experiment brought the most psychologically significant moment. When she reversed the roles and made the brown-eyed students the superiors, the former victims did not try to take revenge on their former oppressors. Instead, they showed remarkable empathy and restraint.

This reaction demonstrated the psychological power of experience-based perspective taking, i.e. actually experiencing another person's experiences rather than just imagining them. The brown-eyed students understood exactly how discrimination feels because they had experienced it themselves. This experiential knowledge led to more compassionate behaviour when they gained power.

The blue-eyed students, now themselves in a minority position, immediately understood what they had done to their classmates. Many became emotional and expressed sincere regret for their previous behaviour. This was not feigned remorse, but genuine understanding born of shared experience of the psychological effects of discrimination.

We learn several important concepts from this role reversal. Cognitive empathy is more effectively developed through experiential learning than through abstract instruction. Power relations shift rapidly under changing circumstances because behaviour depends on context, not just character. Former victims do not automatically become oppressors when they gain power, provided they truly understand the effects of discrimination.

This insight influenced therapeutic approaches such as narrative therapy and schema therapy, in which patients view their life stories from the perspectives of different parts of themselves. It illustrates the function of role-playing in conflict resolution, diversity training and group therapy. The role reversal of the children proved that empathy is not an innate personality trait, but a learnable skill that can be developed through perspective-taking.

The reversal also gives cause for hope. When people truly understand how discrimination feels, they are less likely to discriminate. Prejudices are not inevitable or permanent, but are perpetuated by limited perspectives and experiences of structural violence.

Social context and individual personality

Another psychologically disturbing aspect of Elliott's experiment was the observation of how completely the framework conditions changed individual behaviour. Children who were normally friendly became cruel. Naturally shy students became aggressive leaders. The classroom environment literally changed personalities.

This change illustrates what social psychologists call fundamental attribution error: our tendency to explain behaviour by personality traits rather than situational factors. Elliot's experiment proved that context had a stronger influence than individual character traits.

The children did not reveal any hidden personality traits in their discriminatory behaviour. They responded to social cues that not only made discrimination acceptable, but even rewarded it. Elliott's approval and the classroom environment gave them explicit permission to behave in ways they would never have considered appropriate on their own.

This finding links Elliot's work to other famous psychological experiments such as the Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram's obedience research. All show how normal people behave cruelly when social situations encourage, allow or even demand it. All three experiments reveal both the moral flexibility of human beings and their susceptibility to social influences.

Related Articles

The ‘Universe 25’ experiment and a tragic end in the mouse paradise

Psychology and the invention of fear: The Little Albert experiment