Sociology 2155: Discovering Psychology--Program 20: Constructing Social Reality

We skip the first few minutes of this video, which portrays the mass suicide at Jonestown, and focus on three episodes. In the first, teacher Jane Elliott turns the blue-eyed kids against the brown-eyed kids. In the second, Rosenthal and Jacobsen create classroom dynamics in which some kids "bloom" and others presumably wilt. In the final episode, Elliot Aronson and his colleagues create classroom dynamics that promote racial respect and improved school performance by minorities in an integrated classroom. The narrator presents these episodes as examples of the way in which our interpretation of social situations shapes our behavior. But we are more interested in the extent to which these episodes meet the criteria for field experiments, the implications of this research methodology for establishing causality, and whether the dynamic established in these episodes can readily generalize to the larger world.

1. How did Jane Elliott manage to create divisions between the brown-eyed kids and the blue-eyed kids in her Iowa classroom?

3. How do Rosenthal and Jacobson create a "Pygmalion effect" in some of the classrooms in Jacobson's elementary school?

3. What are jigsaw groups and how do they work?

Sociology 2155: Groups--"Constructing Social Reality"

1. Ethical issues are particularly acute in relation to field experiments, where researchers are intentionally intervening in a way that could be upsetting to the participants. Do you see these classroom experiments as ethical? Why or why not?

2. Look at each of these three episodes in turn and consider whether it meets the criteria of a true experiment? If not, in what ways does it fall short?

a. Blue-eyed/brown-eyed divisions

b. Pygmalion in the classroom

c. Jigsaw groups

3. Field experiments are sometimes viewed as sharing with laboratory experiments the strength in establishing causality and sharing with survey and qualitative research the ability to generalize to the larger social world. What do you think? Do each of these experiments succeed in establishing a causal relationship. Diagram the independent and dependent variables. Do these field experiments readily generalize to the larger social world? What do you think we learn from these experiments that has broader application, not only in classrooms, but in other social situations?