Niranjan Rajadhyaksha writes on an interesting study conducted by two economists in 2004, on the self-fulfilling nature of stereotypes, when people tend to behave unconsciously in accordance with the way they are typecast, in Mint:
Karla Hoff of the World Bank and Priyanka Pandey of Pennsylvania State University collected a group of 622 boys and girls at a junior high school in a village in Uttar Pradesh. They wanted to find out the effects of caste on performance. These students were in classes VI and VII. Half were from the so-called upper castes and the other half from the so-called lower castes.
The children were asked to solve a maze. Those who successfully completed the game were rewarded with money. So, there was a clear economic incentive to play the game for the benefit of the researchers. At first, the castes of the participating children were kept secret. There was very little difference between the success rates of children across castes during this part of the experiment.
Then the castes of the participating children were publicly announced during a second round of the experiment. The lower-caste children suddenly performed significantly worse during this round. The number of mazes that they successfully solved fell by a quarter.
Read the full article: Escaping caste traps
Astounding. However in wrong hands, such findings would be dynamite. Anti-reservation groups would now proclaim that giving reservations would forever keep backwards, backward…that they would never be able to make a life/living/education without reservation. But we know this is not really true. The above is an example of human psychology and the same can be demonstrated in any and every aspect of human life.
When DSS convenes a big meeting and does a press release calling for their “people” not to vote for BJP for religious reasons(primarily, it being a “upper caste dominant party”)… shouldn’t they be banned from electoral process for six years like Bal Thackeray was restrained few years back?
Funny thing- Who were blind to the caste factor- the participnats( Wow- that is BLINDNESS in the study if this is the case) or the evaluators ( who only had to evaluate whether children completed the maze or not) or was the caste factor simply not declared- the authors dont seem to have got their methodology right.
To prove their hypothesis beyond doubt, they should have tried something the other way too. They could have announced that the upper caste kids were of lower IQ than the lower caste kids. If that reversed their results, their hypothesis is proven. If not, it is a whole lot of BS. I still think it is a whole lot of BS anyway.