(It would make sense to me that this exercise is helpful in a time and context where people are open about segregation, and you want to train children out of absorbing it from their culture. Corporate diversity training is a wholly different context: if you have employees who do not already believe that segregation is bad and do not actively want to prevent unjust discrimination, fire them or at least prevent them from managing or interviewing people. No hour-long training is going to make your racist boss suddenly realize that racism is bad.)
This exercise seems like a much more extreme form of it, where you're encouraging people to say stereotypes about actual people who are in the room. Is there any academic study saying that it works? Or is this just something on a .edu website?
(And aren't there studies showing that if you make people listen to stereotypes of a group they belong to being unintelligent, they'll perform worse on standardized tests?)
The "blue-eyes/brown-eyes" experiment was essentially a lighter variation on the better-known "Robbers' Cave Experiment" in psychology. You arbitrarily divide people into two groups, like "blue-eyed folks" and "brown-eyed folks" (in other words, the arbitrariness is quite overt and visible) and then look at how conflict and cooperation play out between the two groups. That's a far cry from what happened during OP's "diversity training" exercise.
(It turns out that conflict won't necessarily arise in that kind of situation, but that it's exceedingly easy for a bad actor (such as the experimenter herself) to manipulate the groups into hating each other. Reference https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/apr/16/a-real-life-... )
(It would make sense to me that this exercise is helpful in a time and context where people are open about segregation, and you want to train children out of absorbing it from their culture. Corporate diversity training is a wholly different context: if you have employees who do not already believe that segregation is bad and do not actively want to prevent unjust discrimination, fire them or at least prevent them from managing or interviewing people. No hour-long training is going to make your racist boss suddenly realize that racism is bad.)
This exercise seems like a much more extreme form of it, where you're encouraging people to say stereotypes about actual people who are in the room. Is there any academic study saying that it works? Or is this just something on a .edu website?
(And aren't there studies showing that if you make people listen to stereotypes of a group they belong to being unintelligent, they'll perform worse on standardized tests?)