Influence

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your classmates who knew the answer. Children who fail in this
system become jealous and resentful of the successes, putting them
down as teacher’s pets or even resorting to violence against them
in the school yard. The successful students, for their part, often
hold the unsuccessful children in contempt, calling them “dumb”
or “stupid.”
This competitive process does not encourage anyone to look
benevolently and happily upon his fellow students.^15
Should we wonder, then, why raw school desegregation—whether
by enforced busing, district rezoning, or school closures—so frequently
produces increased rather than decreased prejudice? When our own
children find their pleasant social and friendship contacts within their
own ethnic boundaries and get repeated exposure to other groups only
in the competitive cauldron of the classroom, we might expect as much.
Are there available solutions to this problem? One possibility might
be to end our attempts at school integration. But that hardly seems
workable. Even were we to ignore the inevitable legal and constitutional
challenges and the disruptive societal wrangle such a retreat would
provoke, there are solid reasons for pursuing classroom integration.
For instance, although white students’ achievement levels remain steady,
it is ten times more likely that the academic performance of minority
students will significantly increase rather than significantly decline
after desegregation. We must be cautious in our approach to school
desegregation not to throw out the baby because it is sitting in some
dirty bath water.
The idea, of course, is to jettison just the water, leaving the baby
shining from the bath. Right now, though, our baby is soaking in the
schmutzwasser of increased racial hostility. Fortunately, real hope for
draining away that hostility is emerging from the research of education
specialists into the concept of “cooperative learning.” Because much of
the heightened prejudice from classroom desegregation seems to stem
from increased exposure to outside group members as rivals, these
educators have experimented with forms of learning in which cooper-
ation rather than competition with classmates is central.
Off to camp. To understand the logic of the cooperative approach, it
helps to reexamine the fascinating, three-decades-old research program
of Turkish-born social scientist Muzafer Sherif. Intrigued with the issue
of intergroup conflict, Sherif decided to investigate the process as it
developed in boys’ summer camps. Although the boys never realized
that they were participants in an experiment, Sherif and his associates
consistently engaged in artful manipulations of the camp’s social envir-
onment to observe the effects on group relations.


Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 135
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