Political scientists, including one of Indian-origin, have found empirical support for what they term the US President Donald Trump's "emboldening effect," of normalising expressions of prejudice, including racially inflammatory speech.
The researchers, including Karthick Ramakrishnan from the University of California Riverside in the US, said when Trump formally announced his presidential candidacy in a June 2015 speech, he declared, among other comments, that "when Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best."
He referred to the Mexican immigrants as rapists, and reiterated his intention to build a "beautiful wall" at the border.
In the years since the election, the researchers said, many have speculated his racially inflammatory speech empowered people with latent prejudices to finally act on them -- a phenomenon known as the "Trump effect."
The team's findings, published in the British Journal of Political Science, suggested that Trump's inflammatory remarks on the campaign trail emboldened particular members of the American public, giving them license to express deeply held prejudices.
In the study, the researchers surveyed a total of nearly 1,000 respondents in two online waves in spring 2016, during the presidential nomination season.
In the first wave, they said, respondents provided demographic information and their political orientations.
To measure the existing prejudice of the respondents, the political scientists asked them to rate how well the words "intelligent," "lazy," "violent," and "here illegally" describe "most Hispanics" in America.
These are measures often used to capture stereotypes people hold about people of Latin American cultural or ethnic identity living in the US, the study noted.
During the second wave of the study, each respondent read one of five articles generated by the researchers, which drew on real election content related to either campaign finance reform or immigration, and discussed the positions of other presidential hopefuls at that time -- Hillary Clinton from the Democratic Party, and Jeb Bush or Donald Trump from the Republican Party.
The study noted that only some articles featured examples of Trump's racially inflammatory speech, and of those, certain articles also included text about other political elites condoning or condemning his remarks.
After reading one of the five articles, the scientists said, each respondent read a short description, and was asked to rate the acceptability of the behaviour depicted by a character in the vignette.
"The purpose of this vignette was to depict a mundane situation in which an individual a) harbors prejudice and b) engages in discriminatory behaviour," the scientists reported.
While most respondents described the behaviour featured in the vignette as completely unacceptable (49 per cent), or unacceptable (42 per cent), the remaining 9 per cent, they said, considered it normatively neutral or acceptable.
According to the scientists, this denoted tolerance of prejudiced behaviour.
They also found exposure to Trump's racially inflammatory speech did have an emboldening effect which made individuals seem to feel more comfortable expressing their prejudice, the study said.
When the respondents weren't exposed to the rhetoric, individuals appeared to suppress their prejudice by actively denouncing behaviour.
"However, we find that this 'suppression effect' slowly unravels and gives way to tolerance and acceptance of prejudiced behaviour following exposure to racially inflammatory speech by a prominent political elite," the scientists wrote in the study.
According to the political scientists, the emboldening effect of Trump's speech on the respondents was strongest when other political elites were presented as tacitly condoning his remarks.
They also found that this effect extended to behaviour toward people of Latin American cultural or ethnic identity in the US.
"The emboldening effect of an elite like Donald Trump is most pronounced in a context where citizens are given signals that the political system tolerates prejudice by allowing candidates who engage in prejudiced speech to continue their campaigns without sanction," they said.
"Last, we find that condemnation by other elites does little to suppress prejudice once it is activated." the scientists added.
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