Kenneth and Mamie Clark
Four baby dolls in the U.S. Supreme Court
Intro
Kenneth Bancroft Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark were a married team of American psychologists who were active in the Civil Rights movement and are most known together for their research on black children.1 The Clarks were the first African Americans to obtain PhDs in psychology from Columbia University. This launched their research on internalized research and the effects of segregation. Most notably, the Clarks conducted the “doll test”, studying children’s preferences for black versus white dolls.1 Their scientific expertise combined with their passion for research on black children allowed them to testify as expert witnesses under the U.S. Supreme Court, in several school desegregation cases. Their work contributed significantly to both the field of psychology and the social fabric of their time, moving toward equal education for black children.
The discrepancy between identifying one’s own color and indicating one’s color preference is too great to be ignored. The negation of the color, brown, exists in the same complexity of attitudes in which there also exists knowledge of the fact that the child himself must be identified with that which he rejects.
- Kenneth and Mamie Clark
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
