9 Unethical Psychological Experiments That Actually Happened

5. Elliott€™s Eye Colour Experiment

Following the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Iowan teacher Jane Elliott sought to show her class of white, middle class 8-year-olds what life was like for 1960s black children. Needless to say, some of the children didn€™t exactly have a good day at school. She divided her class by iris colour and began implying that the blue-eyed children were superior students. Initially, the brown-eyed kids refused to believe her but she soon persuaded them by pretending that the higher levels of melanin associated with blue eyes were scientifically linked with greater intelligence. Subsequently the brown-eyed children stopped objecting, even when Miss Elliott and the blue-eyed kids chastised and bullied them. They were forced to sit on the back rows and had to use a different water fountain. The blue-eyed children were given extra portions at lunch, an additional five minutes of playtime and were praised for their good work. Miss Elliott even encouraged the blue-eyed students to ignore their brown-eyed peers in the playground and not let them join their games. Most shockingly of all however, the €œintellectually inferior€ brown-eyed children ended up performing worse on maths tests than the blue-eyed kids. In fact, the blue-eyed group actually did even better on the tests than on a normal day. The kids only had to make it through six hours of what most black people of the era were subjected to for a lifetime but it goes without saying that this experiment would never be allowed today.