Racial Bullying and Eyewitness Testimony

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Problem 1: Racial Bullying

Due to numerous reports of Racial Bullying in schools, the Racial Bullying Prevention Group UK has sought advice on how to tackle racial school bullying. They have asked to suggest, based on sound social psychological principles and research, what initiatives could be implemented to tackle bullying occurring in schools based on ethnic orientation.

Farrington (1993) described bullying as “physical, verbal or psychological attack or intimidation that is intended to cause fear, distress or harm to the victim.” Therefore, for it to be racial bullying, it must have the elements of Farrington’s definition with the added elements of deliberately targeting an individual’s race, nationality or colour.

One of the reasons racism may occur is due to the increased competition between local races of a country and immigrated races from another country. For example, most whites held negative attitudes toward school districts' attempts to integrate schools via school bussing in the 1970s (Bobo 1983). This was due to contempt towards racial integration due to a perception of blacks as a danger to valued lifestyles, goals, and resources. This can be explained by Realistic Conflict Theory (RCT), proposed by Campbell (1965), who thought that social intergroup interactions were not adequate enough, and hence proposing the idea of RCT. RCT looks at conflicts and competition between groups of people and why they occur, rather than looking solely at social interaction. This theory suggests that conflicts arise due to a lack of understanding of “out-groups”.

This view is supported by Sherif (1961), who conducted a study on young boys called the Robbers Cave experiment. In this study, Sherif devised three different ph...

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... Verbal Information into a Visual Memory” Journal of Experimental Psychology; Human Learning and Memory, 4(1), 19-31

Prescott, K. Milne, R. Clarke, J. (2011) “How effective is the enhanced cognitive interview when aiding recall retrieval of older adults including memory for conversation?” Journal of investigative psychology & offending profiling, 8, 257-270

Scheck, B., Neufeld, P., & Dwyer, J. (2000). Actual Innocence. New York: Random House.

Sherif, M., Harvey, O.J., White, B.J., Hood, W., & Sherif, C.W. (1961). “Intergroup

Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment.” Norman, OK: The

University Book Exchange. 155–184

Valentine, T., Maras, K. (2011) “The effect of cross-examination on the accuracy of adult eyewitness testimony” Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25 (4), 554-661.

Willis, G.B. (1994). Cognitive interviewing: A “how to” guide.

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