Page 369 - The Social Animal

Prejudice 351

they began to see things in him they had never seen before. They
began to like him. For his part, Carlos began to enjoy school more
and began to see the Anglo students in his group not as tormentors
but as helpful and responsible people. Moreover, as he began to feel
increasingly comfortable in class and started to gain more confi-
dence in himself, his academic performance began to improve. The
vicious cycle had been reversed; the elements that had been causing
a downward spiral were changed—the spiral now began to move up-
ward. Within a few weeks, the entire atmosphere in that classroom
had changed dramatically.
We then randomly assigned several classrooms in Austin to the
jigsaw condition and compared them with classrooms using the tra-
ditional competitive method. The results were clear and consistent.
Children in jigsaw classrooms performed better on objective exams,
grew to like each other better, developed a greater liking for school
and greater self-esteem than children in traditional classrooms. The
increase in liking among children in the jigsaw classroom crossed
ethnic and racial barriers, resulting in a sharp decrease in prejudice
and stereotyping. We replicated the same experiment in dozens of
classrooms in several cities—always getting similar results. 98
Over the years, research has shown that the jigsaw method’s ef-
fectiveness is not limited to either Americans or to young children.
The jigsaw method has been used with great success in Europe,
Africa, the Middle East, and Australia—with students at all levels,
from elementary schools to universities. Researchers have also ap-
99
plied the jigsaw method to a variety of prejudices including those
that many people harbor toward people with physical and emotional
disabilities. In one such experiment, 100 college students interacted
with a fellow student who had been portrayed as a former mental pa-
tient. The interactions were part of a structured learning situation,
with some of the students interacting with the “former mental pa-
tient” in a jigsaw group, while others interacted with him in a more
traditional learning climate.The results are striking:Those in the jig-
saw group quickly let go of their stereotypical expectations; they
liked him better and enjoyed interacting with him more than did
those who encountered him in the more traditional learning situa-
tion. Moreover, those people who went through the jigsaw session
with the “former mental patient” subsequently described mental pa-
tients, in general, far more positively.