In the years since Donald Trump took ofice as President of the United States, he has often used incendiary language when discussing immigrants, Muslims and various other groups. Hate crimes have been on the rise in the US since 2015, and a recent review by ABC News found Trump has been invoked in at least 36 criminal cases of violent acts, threats or allegations of assault.

But it has been difficult to quantify the extent to which his language has really inspired or triggered such crimes. Now a study has found that people who strongly identify with Trump say they are more willing to commit violence against immigrants.

When you identify with a person’s values and views, you usually still consider these as separate from yourself, says Jonas Kunst at the University of Oslo in Norway. “But when you experience what we call fusion, the boundaries overlap like a Venn diagram, and you can lose your sense of self a bit.”

More willing to commit violence
The team first asked people how much they identified with Trump, using a common psychological measure for identity fusion. Then they asked questions about which behaviors these people would be willing to engage in.

In one scenario, respondents were told to imagine that a law had been passed outlawing Islamic cultural organisations, and then asked how likely they would be to report members of such organisations to the police, support the use of physical force to find them, and even personally use physical force to track down and detain them.

People whose identities were more fused with Trump were more likely to say they were willing to commit violence in these scenarios.







Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article...#ixzz5yWdsXkuC