Prejudice among Trump supporters increased after he became president

By Emily Reynolds

Whether or not Donald Trump’s presidency actively increased prejudice or simply emboldened those who already held bigoted views was frequently debated during his term. A new study looks more closely at prejudicial attitudes during the presidency, exploring the views of over 10,000 American citizens.

The study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, finds a complex picture. While prejudicial attitudes decreased among Trump’s opponents, his supporters showed an increase in prejudice — and this seems to be because they believed these views had become more socially acceptable.

First, the researchers conducted a set of studies looking at attitudes towards Muslims. In 2014/2015, before Trump came into power, participants completed a scale measuring their levels of Islamophobia. Some also rated how ashamed, angry, guilty, and compassionate they felt towards a Muslim man who had been arrested by US forces and held in Guantanamo Bay prison. Then, two years later once Trump was in office, the participants repeated these measures and answered further questions about their political attitudes generally and support for Trump.

Participants did not, as a whole, increase or decrease in prejudice between the first and second survey. However, when the team looked at Trump supporters and opponents separately, this changed: supporters of Trump showed a significant increase in Islamophobia, while those opposed to Trump showed significant decreases in negativity towards Muslims. These findings were also replicated when participants read the story about the Muslim man imprisoned in a US military prison: Trump supporters reported significantly less concern for the man by the second survey.

Trump support was crucial here: this, rather than conservatism generally or membership of the Republican party, was the most important predictor of changes in prejudice. In fact, conservatives who opposed Trump did not display increases in prejudice.

The next set of studies looked at prejudice against African Americans, again surveying participants before and after Trump’s rise to power. The same patterns held: Trump support predicted increases in prejudice towards Black people, both in implicit and blatant forms. Trump supporters were more likely to agree with racist statements such as “Blacks are not as smart as Whites” by the second survey, for instance. And, again, this held when controlling for political conservatism more generally.

Data from a longitudinal study of American citizens conducted in 2016 and 2011 looked at prejudice against other minorities too. This data again showed that prejudice amongst Trump opponents decreased over this period, while supporters showed an increase in prejudice against some of these groups (for others, they didn’t show a significant increase but still didn’t show the decrease in bigotry seen in society on a broader scale).

What could account for these changes in prejudice? Shifts in social norms that occurred with the rise of Trump seem to be crucial. In a final set of studies looking at perception of other people’s attitudes, participants believed that Americans generally had become more critical of Muslims — something both Trump supporters and non-Trump supporters agreed on. And Trump supporters also reported that those they respected and admired in their own social group had become more critical of Muslims, too. In further experimental studies, the team found that leading people to believe that Trump supporters approved of his anti-immigrant rhetoric led Trump-supporting participants to express a greater degree of prejudice themselves.

While the earlier studies are merely correlational, these later studies provide evidence of some form of causation: that Trump supporters felt it was more acceptable to express prejudice after his election, and that this acceptance facilitated their own further expression. Creating social environments where such speech or action is not acceptable is, on a societal level, easier said than done — future research could look at ways to push back on hateful rhetoric even when it is being promoted by those in the public sphere.

Photo: Donald Trump holds a rally in 2016 after being elected president. Credit: Mark Makela/Getty Images

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2022/04/29/prejudice-among-trump-supporters-increased-after-he-became-president/(accessed 10.5.22)

We Tend To See Acts We Disapprove Of As Deliberate — A Bias That Helps Explain Why Conservatives Believe In Free Will More Than Liberals

By guest blogger Jesse Singal

One of the most important and durable findings in moral and political psychology is that there is a tail-wags-the-dog aspect to human morality. Most of us like to think we have carefully thought-through, coherent moral systems that guide our behaviour and judgements. In reality our behaviour and judgements often stem from gut-level impulses, and only after the fact do we build elaborate moral rationales to justify what we believe and do.

A new paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology examines this issue through a fascinating lens: free will. Or, more specifically, via people’s judgments about how much free will others had when committing various transgressions. The team, led by Jim A. C. Everett of the University of Kent and Cory J. Clark of Durham University, ran 14 studies geared at evaluating the possibility that at least some of the time the moral tail wags the dog: first people decide whether someone is blameworthy, and then judge how much free will they have, in a way that allows them to justify blaming those they want to blame and excusing those they want to excuse.

The researchers examined this hypothesis, for which there is already some evidence, through the lens of American partisan politics. In the paper they note that previous research has shown that conservatives have a greater belief in free will than liberals, and are more moralising in general (that is, they categorise a larger number of acts as morally problematic, and rely on a greater number of principles — or moral foundations — in making these judgements). The first two of the new studies replicated these findings — this is consistent with the idea, put simply, that conservatives believe in free will more because it allows them to level more moral judgements.

There’s a lot to unpack in the remaining studies, but here are a few of the key findings:

In Study 4, the researchers found that when it came to attribution of free will in instances that were viewed as “equally immoral for liberals and conservatives,” (such as spreading malicious rumours about a co-worker) there was no longer any correlation between participants’ political stance (liberal vs. conservative) and their evaluations of how much free will the transgressor had. This lends support to the idea that “differences in conservatives’ and liberals’ perception of free will may be partially due to differences in moralisation, rather than representing any generalised, abstract belief that human behaviours are freely chosen.”

In Study 5, the researchers found that when they deliberately presented participants with hypothetical acts designed to be viewed as more immoral by liberals — such as “Robert sends a formal complaint to his child’s school after finding that his child’s kindergarten teacher is transgendered” — the normal pattern reversed itself, and it was now liberals who attributed more free will to the actors in question. (This finding was weaker, and only statistically significant when the researchers bumped up their sample beyond its initial size.)

In Study 7, the researchers synthesised the aforementioned findings and randomly assigned online participants recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to situations in which the person committing a bad act was either described as liberal or conservative and as acting in order to achieve liberal or conservative goals. After confirming that the MTurk respondents viewed moral harms against their own political group more harshly, the researchers also found “tentative — but weak — evidence” in favour of their overall hypothesis: liberal MTurkers viewed conservative bad actors as having more free will than bad-acting liberals, and conservative MTurkers viewed liberal bad actors as having more free will than bad-acting conservatives. In short, when people take political actions that we morally disapprove of, we’re more inclined to believe they did it of their own volition. This bias afflicts conservatives more often, because they’re more morally disapproving, but can just as easily afflict liberals.

Some of the evidence is mixed, but overall the paper suggests that even judgments about free will (a complex philosophical concept that has been the subject of much debate and introspection) can’t escape the gut-impulse nature that underlies so much human moralising. Though preliminary, this is an important finding that could have ramifications for society. For one thing, if we have a tendency to view agents as more free when their bad acts offend us politically, but as less free when they don’t, that’s the sort of psychological tendency that could be echoed in law enforcement.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/04/14/we-tend-to-see-acts-we-disapprove-of-as-deliberate-a-bias-that-helps-explain-why-conservatives-believe-in-free-will-more-than-liberals/#more-39454(accessed 14.4.20)