From Mindfulness. Langer describes an experiment
We tried to find out whether encouraging children to make distinctions actively would teach them that handicaps are task- and context-specific. Children were shown slides of people and then given a questionnaire relating the people shown with different kinds of skils. For the experimental group, we asked for several answers to each question on the questionnaire. For the control group, we asked for only one answer to each question.
Most of us are brought up to find the answer rather than an answer to questions. We do not easily come up with several alternatives. By requiring that children in the first group give several different answers to each question, we were also requiring them to draw mindful new distinctions.....
One of the slides, for example, pictured a woman who was a cook. She was identified as deaf. The experimental group was asked to write down four reasons why she might be good at her profesion and four reasons why she might be bad. The control group was akded to list one good and one bad reason.
A second part of this training in discrimination present problem situations and asked the children "how" they might be solved. They were to list as many ways as they could think of (experimental group), or they were simply asked whether they could be solved (control group). For instance, when viewing a woman in a wheelchair they were either asked in detail how this person could drive a car or simply asked, Can this person drive a car.
A third exercise in making distinctions involved finding explanations for events. WE gave the children a slide and. ashort writen description of what was happening (for instance, a gril spiling coffee in the lunchroom). The experimental group was told to think up several different explantions for the situation while the control group again considered only one explanation.
After this 'training' the children were given several tests to assess prejudice. One was a measure of general disability discriminatino. They were shown slides of children with and wihtou various handicaps and were asked to indicate whom they wanted on their team for activities such as checkers, soccer, a singalong, a tug of war, a wheelchair race, a game of Frisbee, seesawing, and pinning the tail on the donkey. We chose handicaps and actiities so that nonhandicappped children would be more suited for some activities, handicapped children for other, and for some activities it would not matter....
Those given training in making mindful distinctions learned to be discriminating without prejuice.
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