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Comparison of participants and the UK Population by age group Comparison of participants and the UK Population by age group
Source publication
The Police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has adopted a definition for identifying hate crimes that heavily rely on the victim and witnesses' perception. This brings the topic of perception to the heart of the hate crime discourse. It is of particular importance to the anti-hate measures that are educational-based and focus on raising awar...
Citations
... It is important to add that we conducted our study with participants from the UK, where reporting and recording hate crimes heavily rely on victims' and bystanders' perceptions (Boushehrian, 2020). The definition of hate crimes used by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service in the UK (CPS) states: "Any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice, based on a person's disability or perceived disability; race or perceived race; religion or perceived religion; sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation; transgender identity or perceived transgender identity", which confirms that studying ordinary people's perceptions of hate incidents is of significant relevance. ...
Hate speech incidents often occur in social settings, from public transport to football stadiums. To counteract a prevailing passive attitude towards them, governmental authorities, sociologists, and philosophers stress bystanders’ responsibility to oppose or block hate speech. Here, across two online experiments with UK participants using custom visual vignettes, we provide empirical evidence that bystanders’ expression of opposition can affect how harmful these incidents are perceived, but only as part of a collective response: one expressed by a majority of bystanders present. Experiment 1 (N = 329) shows that the silence or intervention of three bystanders affects the harm caused by hate speech, but one bystander does not. Experiment 2 (N = 269) shows this is not simply a matter of numbers but rather one of norms: only unanimous opposition reduces the public perception of the damage created by the incident. Based on our results, we advance an empirical norm account: group responses to hate speech modulate its harm by indicating either a permissive or a disapproving social norm. Our account and results, showing the need to consider responses to hate speech at a collective level, have direct implications for social psychology, the philosophy of language and public policies.
