Expressive Responding in Support of Donald Trump: An Extended Replication of Schaffner and Luks (2018)

Abstract

There is considerable debate about whether survey respondents regularly engage in “expressive responding” – professing to believe something that they do not sincerely believe to show support for their in-group or hostility to an out-group. Nonetheless, there is widespread agreement that one study provides compelling evidence for a consequential level of expressive responding in a particular context. In the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2017 presidential inauguration rally there was considerable controversy about whether this inauguration crowd was the largest ever. At this time, a study was conducted which found that Donald Trump voters were more likely than Hillary Clinton voters or non-voters to indicate that an unlabeled photo of Donald Trump’s 2017 presidential inauguration rally showed more people than an unlabeled photo of Barack Obama’s 2009 presidential inauguration rally, despite the latter photo clearly showing more people. However, this study was not pre-registered, suggesting that a replication is needed to establish the robustness of this important result. In the present study, we conducted an extended replication over two years after Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration rally. We found that despite this delay the original result replicated, albeit with a smaller magnitude. In addition, we extended the earlier study by testing several hypotheses about the characteristics of Republicans who selected the incorrect photo.

Delusion-like beliefs and data quality: Are classic cognitive biases artifacts of carelessness?

“…It is possible that the current study and the studies of Ross et al (2016) and So et al (2023) failed to find clear evidence of cognitive biases because they were conducted online, where participants can be careless (Brühlmann et al, 2020) and dishonest (Ross & Levy, 2023). However, this seems unlikely because research suggests that participants in online studies are at least as diligent—or even more diligent—than participants in the laboratory (Hauser & Schwarz, 2016; Kees et al, 2017; Ramsey et al, 2016).…”

“…3In fact, there is compelling evidence that surprisingly large numbers of people are willing to lie about their beliefs in surveys in certain contexts (Ross & Levy, 2023). …”

“…For Hypothesis 4, we preregistered an intention to test for an association between liberal acceptance bias BEADS and the liberal acceptance bias BADE , but a point of oversight was that we neglected to preregister an intention to test for a relationship between these biases and delusion-like beliefs.3 In fact, there is compelling evidence that surprisingly large numbers of people are willing to lie about their beliefs in surveys in certain contexts(Ross & Levy, 2023).DELUSION-LIKE BELIEFS AND DATA QUALITY 3This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.Content may be shared at no cost, but any requests to reuse this content in part or whole must go through the American Psychological Association.…”

“…For Hypothesis 4, we preregistered an intention to test for an association between liberal acceptance bias BEADS and the liberal acceptance bias BADE , but a point of oversight was that we neglected to preregister an intention to test for a relationship between these biases and delusion-like beliefs.3 In fact, there is compelling evidence that surprisingly large numbers of people are willing to lie about their beliefs in surveys in certain contexts(Ross & Levy, 2023).DELUSION-LIKE BELIEFS AND DATA QUALITY…”

Too humble for words

“…Further, incentives to report accurately reduce the partisan gap in responses (Prior et al, 2015 ). Most compellingly Schaffner and Luks ( 2018 ) found that Republicans were significantly more likely than Democrats to report that an (unlabelled) photograph of the Trump inauguration depicted a larger crowd than a similar photograph of the Obama inauguration (see Ross & Levy, 2022 for a replication). It’s really not plausible that they truly believe that the first photo depicts a bigger crowd; rather, they’re expressing their support for one side of politics.…”