The Lucifer Effect: Elementary School Nazis

    In the Luicifer Effect readings, we learned about a scenario where an elementary school teacher convinced her students that blue-eyed children were better than brown eyed ones, leading to a huge change in behavior, including name-calling and a new divide in academic results between brown and blue-eyed kids. After this, she reversed the roles, telling the students that brown-eyed people were actually superior. After reading this section, I began to wonder: to what extent does age matter in these experiments? From the readings, it seemed that the older people had to be gently prodded more to get to a state of furor, with the college students being asked a series of questions with increasing severity. The high schoolers also had to be given a series on increasing difficulty of instructions to reach their state of frenzy, whereas the elementary schoolers only had to be told a few "facts" about eye color to become hateful. Furthermore, I did some further research and stumbled on this (https://books.google.com/books?id=WXGUxpv9aSwC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA270#v=onepage&q&f=false) online textbook, which says that, in the Milgrim experiments, the old and young subjects had negligible differences in obedience to women. However, when instructed by a man, the younger people were much more obedient, and the older subjects were significantly more disobedient than when asked by a woman. Although this is beyond the material that we have covered in class, and I was unable to find much information on the topic, I can theorize that the subjects of this one of Milgrim's test, who were all men, subconsciously saw an older man as an almost fatherly figure, accepting his authority in the experiment, while they saw younger men as challengers and rejected their instruction. This would also explain why, when the instructor was a woman, the obedience was roughly baseline, as this subconscious paternal vs challenger was never put into play. What are your guys' thoughts on what caused this discrepancy in obedience between people who were asked by women and men, as well as the obedience change between the ages.