True Left

A series of 13 studies with over 10,000 participants tested the change in Americans’ prejudice following the presidency of Donald Trump. The researchers found that explicit racial and religious prejudice increased amongst Trump’s supporters, while prejudice decreased among those who opposed him. This research was published in Nature Human Behavior.
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Across Studies 1-9, Ruisch and Ferguson found that support for Donald Trump predicted “a significant increase in prejudice towards a range of social, racial and religious minoritized groups.” Those who generally opposed Trump, including liberals and conservatives, showed decreases in prejudice in the same time period. Studies 10-13 provided indirect support for the mechanism behind the shift in social norms.

Trump supporters perceived that expressing prejudice had become more acceptable since his election, and this perception predicted greater personal prejudice among them. As well, “experimentally leading participants to feel that Trump supporters approved of his controversial rhetoric significantly increased Trump supporters’ personal expressions of prejudice .”

Although these correlational studies cannot speak to causality, our final four studies provided indirect support for our proposed causal mechanism of shifting social norms: Trump supporters perceive that it has become more acceptable to express prejudice since Trump’s election (study 10), and the perception that prejudice is more acceptable predicts greater personal prejudice amongst Trump supporters (study 11). Providing more decisive causal evidence for this proposed norms mechanism, we found (studies 12 and 13) that experimentally leading participants to feel that Trump supporters approved of his controversial rhetoric significantly increased Trump supporters’ personal expressions of prejudice.