Jane Elliott's Experiment Summary

On Jane Elliott’s Experiment: Racism by Nurture or Nature?

The day after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jane Elliott - a primary school teacher in Riceville, Iowa - decided to channel her agony into making a difference and started an experimental journey to date. She designed her Blue-Eye/Brown Eye Experiment in pursuit of answering the following question: is racism something human-beings get to learn? Better-said, is it by nature, or by nurture that we act racist? (Elliott, 2003-2006). Her answer was clear: it is by nurture, not nature that we act so unreasoningly. If it is so, we may well change our conducts by nurturing them in a different way and this is what she dedicated her time – to educate – by way of the replicates of her experiment. Such a teaching

Space allows mentioning only a few. First of all, it is not clear whether Jane’s harsh ways are really necessary to boost the productivity of the experiment. She does not define adequately the marginal utility of her manners and there is not enough explanation on why does it have to be the hard way as Elliott suggests for us to be able to learn this lesson. Indeed, this seems to be one of the reasons that she faces resistance from the participants from time to time. The younger the participants, the more easily they tend to play along with their assigned roles and have no problem obeying Jane. Other participants, such as those observed in the videos tend to resist such a treatment and setting. Such resistance is what actually led Jane to add a surveillance strategy to guarantee obedience, according to which the blue-eyed participants were to sit in the middle of the brown-eyed participants. Even though Jane is convinced that people only learn by heart via harsh first-hand experience, if one is to compare the levels of effectiveness when it comes to teaching via harsh methods and teaching via gentile methods, my educated guess would be for the