I’ll explain my\u00a0rationale for this heads-up below, but I really want to make the more general point that sometimes social scientists can contribute to public debates even when we aren’t the leading experts on a topic. We have to be more careful and guarded in our claims, of course,\u00a0when our expertise is limited to reading and teaching what others have written. Still, we can provide a service even when we raise questions or help people\u00a0“connect the dots” in\u00a0a useful way. My approach is usually\u00a0to just point to the\u00a0“dots” \u00a0that I’ve found convincing\u00a0and to\u00a0ask questions about whether and how the policy action being considered might take account of them.<\/p>\n
I base my bullying heads-up on two related lines of social science research.\u00a0The first concerns implicit racial bias in perceptions of threat and dangerousness. The chart below is taken from a 2010 piece by Kimberly Kahn and Paul Davies<\/a>, who\u00a0\u00a0showed that both\u00a0White and African American study participants were more likely to\u00a0assume people with stereotypically African American features had guns in a split-second shoot\/don’t shoot computer simulation. Both Whites and African Americans mistakenly shot targets with darker skin, broader noses, and fuller lips\u00a0about 11 percent of the time, relative to 8 or 9 percent of the time for White targets and “low-stereotypical” African American targets. This sort of pattern\u00a0is evident in a lot of research on “implicit bias,” where whites tend to be perceived as more\u00a0safe and less threatening than (otherwise identical) African Americans.\u00a0My sense from this research is that\u00a0actions by darker-skinned students might be more likely to be perceived and punished as bullying than when the same actions are taken by lighter-skinned students.<\/p>\n The second “dot” is that\u00a0most of the self-report studies I’ve seen also show racial differences in self-reported<\/em> bullying behavior. The chart below is taken from a 2007 study in the Journal of Adolescent Health by Aubrey Spriggs and colleagues<\/a>. According to their\u00a0analysis of a nationally representative\u00a0sample of 6th to 10th graders,\u00a0African American children were significantly less likely than White children\u00a0to report they were targets of bullying and significantly more likely to report engaging in bullying behaviors themselves.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/files\/2012\/02\/shooter1-300x218.jpg\" "\\"shooter\\"")
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