When developing and implanting her class lesson, Jane Elliot sought to explore and explain the

concepts of racism and discrimination to her students. Elliot embodied social sciences by educating the
students on social behavior and influence while documenting the experience to study and analyze its
outcome. Her experiment reinforced many of the originating theories and concepts that Sociology is
based on, including Social Darwinism, Class Conflict theory, Functionalism, Social Integration and
Symbolic Interactionism.

The experiment itself was, in not so many words, based on Social Darwinism, the belief that
there are lower and higher forms of society and Elliot sought to education the class on why a group of
society might be labeled as such and treated differently because of that label. Elliott utilized the class
conflict theory to begin her lesson by informing her students that those with blue eyes were more
intelligent than brown eyed students. The blue-eyed students, group A, were granted special privileges
and instructed to disregard the “inferior” brown eyed students, group B, that were exiled to the back of
the classroom.

Elliot gave students in group A with blue eyes preferential treatment and positive reinforcement
thus enabling a sense of superiority in the group A students over the group B students. Elliot employed
the Symbolic Interactionism theory by assigning the “inferior” group B, brown eyed students, a collar
that they had to wear so students could easily be differentiated. This created a noticeable rift in the
classroom that previously worked well with one another.

The following day, Elliot changed the rolls and told Group B, the brown eyed students, that they
were the “superior” group and that group A, the blue eyed children, had to wear the collars and sit in
the back of the class. Elliot then employed the same preferential treatment and positive reinforcement
she had used on the previous day students but this time to the Group B students, again, enabling a
sense of superiority in them.

If either of these rolls were assigned on a permanent basis, this would obviously create even
further of a rift in between the students and the temporary sense of superiority would become
permanent. The “superior” group would excel no only in school but in everyday life while the “inferior”
group would succumb to their labels and excel less both in the classroom and in everyday life.