The effects of additional exposure, including potential normalization or desensitization, may therefore have been limited, especially given Internet use levels in our sample ( 31). Second, we conducted our experiment in a saturated news environment in which many respondents had presumably already been exposed to Trump’s statements multiple times via other means. Twitter, for example, flagged some of Trump’s claims about fraud after the election for including disputed or misleading information, which may shape users’ reactions to such content ( 30). The effects of Trump’s tweets likely also vary by whether they are reinforced or countered by other information, a design variant that should be evaluated in future research. While we strove for realism in the design of our treatments, participants nonetheless encountered Trump’s tweets in the context of an online survey rather than the way they would on Twitter or in other settings in which they are exposed to political news and information. Desensitization thus appears to be a more likely consequence of repeated exposure to norm violations than normalization, but our results are not conclusive. As with the change in reactions between waves 2 and 3, we instead observe only a single significant subgroup effect (anxiety decreases by 0.20 among Trump disapprovers after exposure to general norm violations, P < 0.05). However, although these contrasts are statistically significant under classical hypothesis tests, none remain significant after our FDR correction. Additionally, prior exposure to election or general norm violation tweets decreases both anger and anxiety in response to novel election norm violation tweets in wave 4 (by 0.14 to 0.16 for anger and 0.14 for anxiety, on four-point scales). However, these declines are significant for only one subgroup of respondents in one treatment condition after we apply our preregistered adjustment to the P values to control the FDR: decreased anger in response to general norm violation tweets among Trump disapprovers ( − 0.14, P < 0.005). Self-reported anger and anxiety both decrease between waves 2 and 3 among people exposed to either type of norm-violating rhetoric (by 0.07 to 0.08 for anger and 0.06 to 0.08 for anxiety, on four-point scales). By contrast, evidence of desensitization is mixed (see SI Appendix, Tables S18, S19, S21, and S22). We find no significant effects of the treatments on beliefs that past candidates failed to respect narrow losses overall or by Trump approval (see SI Appendix, Tables S15 and S16). We test for normalization by examining treatment effects on perceptions of past respect for democratic norms. Three effect estimates indicate that exposure to these statements reduces trust in elections among Trump approvers using unadjusted P values, but none remain statistically significant after our preregistered FDR adjustment (see SI Appendix, Table S7).įinally, we investigate whether repeated exposure to norm violations creates normalization (RQ3) and/or desensitization (RQ4). 1 shows a similar but weaker pattern for general norm violation tweets. More broadly, it suggests that reactions to norm violations may be conditional upon attitudes toward the individual in question. This result is consistent with literature that finds citizens often adopt political beliefs that rationalize their partisan preferences ( 29). By contrast, exposure to the election norm violation tweets actually increases trust and confidence in elections by 0.11 standard deviations, on average ( P < 0.01 after P values are adjusted to control the FDR), among Trump disapprovers, mirroring the observational trend observed from 2014 to 2016 among supporters of Hillary Clinton ( 28). As the figure indicates, Trump’s election norm violations decrease trust and confidence in elections among people who approve of him by 0.24 standard deviations, on average, across waves ( P < 0.005).
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