Operant Racism

by Joaquine G.

B.F. Skinner

Operant conditioning plays an important role in racism. There are many examples that can be found how some people have been conditioned to be racist or to discriminate against some people from different background or religion.  But many of those examples have different outcomes and sometimes it varies, but one “experiment” by Dr. Elliott is able to replicate the outcome time after time. She did an “experiment” where she told a group of kids that blue eyes were more intelligent than the brown eyes ones. The kids during that day segregated and hanged out with the kids with the same eye color, and then the next day she told them that she was wrong and that actually the kids with brown eyes were more intelligent than kids with blue eyes. The kids with brown eyes discriminated the kids with blue eyes that day. She noticed that no matter what eye color group was in power they always discriminated those that were “inferior” and they did not learned anything by being in the other side of the issue. Continue Reading »