Understanding Society
Helpful Toddlers?
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
At eighteen months, a child in psychologist Felix Warneken’s research climbs out of a ball pit to help a stranger and expects nothing in return. Doug then makes a sharp turn. Through Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, he revisits educator Jane Elliott’s Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes exercise, in which an invented hierarchy based on eye color quickly transformed cooperative third-graders into contemptuous rivals.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
Psychologist Felix Warneken investigates how helpful toddlers are. His experiments revealed that even at the tender age of eighteen months children are only too eager to help others, happily taking a break from fun and games to lend a hand, helping a stranger even when you throw a ball pit into the mix. A video can be found on YouTube of a child climbing out of a ball pit to help someone in return. And they want nothing in return.
Unfortunately, children can be turned against each other. Jane Elliott gave her class of third graders a hands-on lesson in racism. She began, “the brown-eyed people are the better people in this room. They are cleaner and they are smarter.” In capital letters she wrote the word MELANIN on the chalkboard, explain that this is the chemical that makes people smart. As kids with brown eyes had more of it, they were also more intelligent, whereas the blue-eyed counterparts sit around and do nothing.
It didn’t take long for the Brownies to start talking down to the Blueys, and then for the Blueys to lose their confidence. A normally smart blue-eyed girl began making mistakes during a maths lesson. During the break afterwards, she was approached by three brown eyed friends. ‘You better apologize to us for getting our way,’ one of them said, ‘because we are better than you are.’
When this tape was shown on the Tonight Show, White America was outraged. ‘How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children,’ wrote one angry viewer. ‘Black children grow up accustomed to such behavior, but white children, there’s no way they could possibly understand it. It’s cruel to white children and will cause them great psychological damage.’
This viewer is mind boggling. She is completely oblivious to the psychological damage that is being done to black children.