Donald Trump’s 2024 election win increased the social acceptability of prejudice, study suggests

Following the 2024 United States presidential election, new evidence suggests that negative political rhetoric continues to shape how Americans express prejudice. A recent study reveals that groups targeted by Donald Trump during his campaign experienced an increase in both the perceived acceptability of prejudice and self-reported prejudice against them. This research was published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Political campaigns help shape the unwritten rules, or social norms, that govern how people act and speak in everyday life. Because individuals naturally want to fit in, they tend to hide their prejudices when society disapproves of them. However, when a prominent political figure openly uses derogatory language against specific groups, it sends a signal that these negative attitudes are now socially acceptable.

This public validation acts as a form of permission, providing evidence to ordinary citizens that they are justified in expressing previously hidden biases. Scientists observed this exact shift in social expectations following the 2016 election of Donald Trump. After his initial campaign, voters across the political spectrum agreed that expressing prejudice against specifically targeted groups, such as immigrants and Muslims, had become much more acceptable.

For the current study, researchers wanted to test if Trump’s 2024 reelection would trigger a similar reaction in a different political climate. During the 2024 campaign, the candidate repeated harsh rhetoric against several minority communities. The researchers designed their study to see if this continued exposure to hostile political language would again desensitize the public to hate and alter personal levels of prejudice.

“This is a replication study, suggested by Sam Arnold, the first author, to look at Trump’s effect on how people think prejudice is acceptable to express,” explained corresponding author Christian S. Crandall, a professor of psychology at the University of Kansas.

“In 2016, our lab looked at the effect of Trump’s election on whether people could express more prejudice, as a result. We found it was considered OK to express more prejudice—but it was mostly limited to groups Trump had attacked in the campaign. Other groups didn’t shift. Would it happen if Trump were elected in 2024?”

To investigate this, the scientists designed a study around the November 2024 presidential election. They recruited undergraduate students from a large midwestern state university to serve as participants. The study required these participants to evaluate a wide variety of social groups, including immigrants, Muslims, Asian Americans, disabled people, and many others, totaling 128 distinct groups.

The scientists collected data in two main phases to capture attitudes before and after the political event. The pre-election phase took place between September and October 2024 and included 362 participants. The post-election phase occurred in mid-November 2024 and involved a separate group of 261 participants.

Participants in both groups were randomly assigned to rate 60 of the 128 social groups. For each group, participants answered questions about the social acceptability of prejudice. They used a three-point scale to indicate whether it was definitely not acceptable, maybe acceptable, or definitely acceptable to feel negatively toward the group.

Participants also rated their own personal prejudice toward these groups using a scale from zero to one hundred. On this scale, a score of zero indicated very negative feelings, while one hundred indicated very positive feelings. The responses were later reversed during analysis so that higher scores reflected higher levels of prejudice.

To measure the impact of political speech, the researchers recruited a third group of 188 participants in December 2024. These individuals evaluated how positively or negatively Donald Trump spoke about each of the 128 groups during his campaign. Participants rated the rhetoric on a scale ranging from negative three to positive three, providing a specific measure of the campaign’s hostility toward each social group.

The scientists then analyzed the data by combining the individual responses into group-level averages. They compared the pre-election ratings with the post-election ratings to see if attitudes shifted in a meaningful way. They used a statistical model that accounts for existing levels of prejudice before the election, which allowed them to isolate the specific impact of the campaign rhetoric.

When people evaluate a wide range of groups, they naturally rate widely admired professions very positively and widely disliked groups very negatively. The researchers used statistical techniques to separate these general feelings from the specific impact of the political campaign. This approach ensured that the results reflected true shifts in prejudice rather than basic preferences for certain types of people.

The findings showed that prejudice expression and perceived acceptability are closely linked. Across the entire dataset, self-reported prejudice correlated very highly with the perceived social acceptability of that prejudice. This pattern remained stable both before and after the election, suggesting that people are highly sensitive to social norms when reporting their own biases.

When evaluating the changes across the election cycle, the baseline levels of prejudice remained highly stable. How participants rated a social group before the election strongly predicted how they would rate that group afterward, leaving only a small margin for attitudes to shift. Despite this high level of stability, the specific negativity of Trump’s campaign rhetoric accounted for a clear and significant change within that remaining margin.

Specifically, when Trump spoke harshly about marginalized communities during his campaign, such as immigrants, Haitians, and Asian Americans, participants were more likely to view prejudice against them as socially acceptable after he won.

Beyond altering these societal rules, this negative political language also predicted a direct rise in the participants’ own internal biases. Following the 2024 election, individuals admitted to holding stronger personal prejudices against the exact groups that the campaign had heavily criticized, which also included Muslims and transgender people.

“If people have any attitudes at all about a group, they’re likely to be stable,” Crandall told PsyPost. “But Trump can create strong new prejudices, especially if people don’t have much of an opinion about the group in the first place. Attitudes are fairly difficult to change, but they’re much easier to create.”

Surprisingly, this effect occurred equally among participants who leaned Democratic and those who leaned Republican. The political rhetoric seemed to influence the entire sample, regardless of their personal voting preferences. The scientists interpret this as evidence that the election of a prominent leader normalizes the language used during their campaign.

“The effects are not large but they are spread out across the whole nation and population,” Crandall said. “I think that various kinds of prejudice have become much more overt. Antisemitism (which the administration says it’s fighting, but that seems to be a cover to attack universities, and I’m saying that as a personal opinion, not on the data), and elimination of all DEI-relevant policies and grants seem to be backing off concern for civil rights.”

These findings build upon a growing body of research regarding political leadership and social behavior. The results mostly align with the previous study conducted by the research team following the 2016 election. In 2016, the scientists also found that Trump’s negative rhetoric increased the perceived acceptability of prejudice, showing that this shift in social norms is a repeating phenomenon.

However, the new findings diverge from the 2016 data in one specific way. In the 2016 study, participants actually reported lower levels of personal prejudice after the election. At the time, scientists proposed that the surprising election results changed people’s comparison standards, making individuals feel less prejudiced compared to the rest of the nation. The 2024 election was less surprising, which might explain the different outcomes in self-reported prejudice.

The recent findings align more closely with other long-term studies of political behavior. For instance, a 2022 study involving over ten thousand Americans found that explicit racial and religious prejudice increased among Trump supporters following the 2016 election.

The new research also aligns with broader trends in American society regarding bias. A recent 2025 study found that prejudices against various marginalized groups are becoming increasingly connected and tied to conservative political ideology.

But as with all research, the study does have some limitations. The participants were predominantly White and female college students from the midwestern United States. This demographic makeup limits how confidently the findings can be applied to the broader national population.

The study also evaluated changes over a span of just a few weeks. Because of this short timeframe, the long-term stability of these shifts remains unknown. The research also relied on an observational design rather than a controlled experiment.

Due to the observational nature of the research, it is impossible to completely rule out other historical events that happened at the same time as the election. The group-level data analysis also makes it difficult to understand how specific marginalized communities experienced these changing norms. The data reflects the perceptions of the general population rather than the targets of the prejudice.

Future research will likely explore the specific mechanisms that connect political leadership to individual prejudice. The scientists plan to investigate how much of human prejudice is driven simply by a desire to conform to social rules. They hope to understand how political figures act as role models for acceptable behavior in society.

“Our work is showing that prejudice is controlled a lot by social norms and rules about what’s OK to say and to feel,” Crandall said. “A major chuck — maybe the biggest single chunk — of prejudice is conformity. And Trump leads.”

The study, “Changing Norms Following the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election: The Trump Effect on Prejudice Redux,” was authored by Samuel E. Arnold, Jenniffer Wong Chavez, Kelly S. Swanson, and Christian S. Crandall.