{"id":70337,"date":"2017-06-07T09:03:43","date_gmt":"2017-06-07T14:03:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=70337"},"modified":"2017-06-02T20:40:30","modified_gmt":"2017-06-03T01:40:30","slug":"trumps-election-made-people-less-private-about-anti-immigrant-attitudes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2017\/06\/07\/trumps-election-made-people-less-private-about-anti-immigrant-attitudes\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump&#8217;s election made people less private about anti-immigrant attitudes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Originally posted at <a href=\"http:\/\/montclairsoci.blogspot.com\/2017\/06\/elections-have-consequences-for-norms.html\">Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Did Donald Trump\u2019s campaign and election cry havoc and unleash the dogs of racism?<\/p>\n<p>Last June, hauling out <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Techniques_of_neutralization\">Sykes and Matza\u2019s concept of \u201cneutralization,\u201d<\/a> I <a href=\"http:\/\/montclairsoci.blogspot.com\/2016\/06\/for-political-correctness.html\">argued<\/a>\u00a0that Trump\u2019s constant denigration of \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d allowed his supporters to neutralize norms against racism. If the denigration of political correctness means that the people who condemn racism are wrong or bad, then what they are condemning must be OK. The logic might not be impeccable, but it works. I argued that I wasn\u2019t sure that Trump had caused an increase in racist attitudes, but he gave people a license to express those attitudes.<\/p>\n<p>Aziz Ansari made a similar point on Saturday Night Live\u00a0 the day after the inauguration. (Apologies if you have to wait through an ad.)<\/p>\n<div><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Whde50AacZs?&amp;start=140&amp;end=246\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ffffff;\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Ansari\u2019s version is much better than mine, and it reached a slightly larger audience. But there\u2019s another important difference. I was talking about the message Trump\u00a0supporters took from Trump himself before the election. Ansari is talking about the message they got from the electorate. The election changed their perceptions of the norms about expressing anti-immigrant views.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s as though minds of half the country had been clouded by \u201cpluralistic ignorance.\u201d That\u2019s the scenario where each person thinks X but assumes that everyone else thinks Y, so everyone keeps their true ideas to themselves. Then something happens that reveals those previously hidden preferences, and suddenly everyone feels liberated. From the Trump\u00a0supporters&#8217; perspective, Trump was Dorothy throwing a bucket of water to dissolve the Wicked Witch of Political Correctness, and now all the Munchkins were free to express their feelings about Mexicans and Muslims (and perhaps others).<\/p>\n<p>The 20% increase in hate crimes after the election certainly suggests that racists felt liberated by the election. Unfortunately, because of the uncontrolled variables and the small sample size of just one candidate winning\u00a0one election, this bit of evidence is hardly conclusive.<\/p>\n<p>But we now have some experimental evidence on the topic. In the two weeks before the election, three economists <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nber.org\/papers\/w23415\">surveyed<\/a> Mechanical Turkers in eight very Red states. The MTurkers were asked, in addition to other on-topic questions, if they would authorize the economists to make a donation on their behalf to a strongly anti-immigrant group, FAIR.\u00a0 Mturkers were told, \u201cThe founder of FAIR is John Tanton, author of `The Immigration Invasion&#8217; who wrote \u2018I\u2019ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p>For half the MTurkers, the donation question included this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Note: just like any other answer to this survey, also <b>your donation decision will be completely anonymous<\/b>. No one, not even the researchers, will be able to match your decision to your name. [emphasis in original]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The other half were told:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Important: in order to ensure the quality of the data collected, a member of the research team might <b>personally contact you<\/b> to verify your answers to the next question and the following ones. [emphasis in original]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In addition, some of the people were told that Trump was certain to win their state. Others were given no information.<\/p>\n<p>The results strongly support the idea that norms \u2013 or at least people\u2019s perceptions of the norms \u2013 make a big difference. People who thought their choice would be public were much less likely to make the anti-immigrant donation \u2013 34% vs. 54%. But that difference held true only for people who were not told how popular Trump was in their state. Among the people who were told basically, \u201cTrump is a sure thing to win your state,\u201d knowing that their donation would be public (i.e., known to the surveyors) made no difference in their willingness to donate.<\/p>\n<p>If the researchers had stopped there, they would have been able to say<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>there seems to be a norm against giving money to anti-immigrant groups<\/li>\n<li>the knowledge of that norm makes people less willing to make a donation to blatantly racist anti-immigrant group if even one stranger can know about that donation<\/li>\n<li>if people think that many others in their state support an anti-immigrant candidate, they no longer feel that they need to keep their anti-immigrant views to themselves<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Thanks the results of the election, though, they didn&#8217;t have to stop there. The gave the researchers a natural experiment to find out if the norms \u2013 or at least perceptions of the norms \u2013 had changed. Had Trump\u2019s victory caused the scales of pluralistic ignorance to fall from the eyes of these Red-state Turkers?<\/p>\n<p>The answer was yes. The election had the same effect as did the information about Trump support in the person\u2019s state. It obliterated the difference between the public and private conditions.<\/p>\n<div class=\"separator\"><a href=\"https:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/-BiIh443ZgpI\/WTCG0dXOcrI\/AAAAAAAAII8\/d-7_rP10Bh8os5ljj96kncix3RfheZxGwCLcB\/s1600\/MTurk.jpg\" data-rel=\"lightbox-image-0\" data-rl_title=\"\" data-rl_caption=\"\" title=\"\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/-BiIh443ZgpI\/WTCG0dXOcrI\/AAAAAAAAII8\/d-7_rP10Bh8os5ljj96kncix3RfheZxGwCLcB\/s400\/MTurk.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"363\" border=\"0\" data-original-height=\"603\" data-original-width=\"830\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>To people who were reluctant to let their agreement with FAIR be known, Trump\u2019s victory said, \u201cIt\u2019s OK. You can come out of the closet. You\u2019re among friends, and there are more of us than you thought.\u201d<\/p>\n<span class=\"ft_signature\"> Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/profilepages\/view_profile.php?username=livingstonj\">Montclair State University<\/a>.  You can follow him at <a href=\"http:\/\/montclairsoci.blogspot.com\/\">Montclair SocioBlog<\/a> or on <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/JayLivingston\">Twitter<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Originally posted at Montclair SocioBlog. Did Donald Trump\u2019s campaign and election cry havoc and unleash the dogs of racism? Last June, hauling out Sykes and Matza\u2019s concept of \u201cneutralization,\u201d I argued\u00a0that Trump\u2019s constant denigration of \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d allowed his supporters to neutralize norms against racism. If the denigration of political correctness means that the people [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":70338,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23656,2125,85,20068,283,37],"class_list":["post-70337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-immigrants-prejudicediscrimination","tag-immigrationcitizenship","tag-politics","tag-politics-election-2016","tag-prejudicediscrimination","tag-social-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2017\/06\/1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70337"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70341,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70337\/revisions\/70341"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}