Do you remember this racially-insensitive book from the '90s?

November 5, 2011 2:22 AM

Does anyone remember this book, or the controversial argument at its core? It would have been published in the late 1990's, and argued that blue eyed candidates got the job more often than thier brown eyed peers- a friend mentioned the book, which I vaguely remember, but neither one of us can find a title or author. Help!
posted by biddeford to Human Relations (4 answers total)

Are you thinking of this: Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray? Don't specifically remember the eye color part, it was a long book and I read it over 10 years ago, but that sounds like something they would have commented on.
posted by jhs at 3:27 AM on November 5, 2011

(IDK. But: you might be interested in this famous, mass-televised experiment.)
posted by taramosalata at 2:28 PM on November 5, 2011

Lester Thurow had a thought experiment using blue-eyed and brown-eyed persons being chosen for employment, to illustrate the dangers of stereotyping, even stereotyping justified by statistics. The original work was in the 1970s, but the essay appears to have been quoted in a couple of works in the 1990s.
posted by dhartung at 9:53 PM on November 5, 2011

Response by poster: I don't know about my friend, but I was thinking of the experiments mentioned as well as The Bell Curve, so thanks for the links.
posted by biddeford at 1:35 AM on November 6, 2011