Then they were told to indicate when they knew for sure what it was they were looking at. Those in the second group were not asked to guess but were merely told to let the experimenter know when they were sure about what they were looking at. It turned out that those who had not been asked to make early guesses could decide much faster what they were looking at than the others. The lesson is that if you're too quick to form an opinion of what's going on around you, you practically have to be hit on the head with the truth before you know it's there. What's really odd in the ebonics case is that people's opinions got formed by what they read in the newspapers.
People seem to trust journalists.
Immediately after the first news reports came out, representatives of the board said that their resolution shouldn't have been interpreted as suggesting that black English was biologically innate. This correction or clarification was repeated daily from then on. Yet more than a month afterwards we still saw newspaper columns by black speakers of the King's English saying that they themselves couldn't speak or understand black English so it surely wasn't genetic. I see two reasons for the misapprehensions. First, there are folk beliefs about language that differ rather markedly from what professional linguists believe, and have been trying to teach for sixty or seventy years.