A tranche of psychological studies found something startling about Donald Trump’s most loyal soldiers: they each turn to a grim coping mechanism to make sense of the real estate mogul’s laundry list of lies and documented sexual abuse.
Three separate research papers, published together in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology, each pointing to the same conclusion. In October 2019, psychologists surveyed 128 US adults who indicated a preference for Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Asked how they justified their support for the GOP candidate given allegations of his sexual misconduct, over half the group said they simply didn’t believe the charge.
Those results were reproduced in a second study, started in December 2019, two days after federal lawmakers voted to impeach the president. This time, 173 MAGA diehards largely either denied the accusations, or demurred by changing the topic to Trump’s policy decisions. In that study, the majority of supporters denied the accusations outright, while 15 percent declared they simply don’t care.
The most recent study, a 2022 survey taken immediately after Trump was arraigned for his role in the January 6 riots, found that of 187 participants, over 60 percent felt the accusations against the president were a lie.
While each study is highly complex in their own right, together they reinforce the finding that denial of factual information — Trump’s seedy misdeeds, basically — is a direct response to anxiety caused by cognitive dissonance.
“I was motivated by real-life experiences,” study author Cindy Harmon-Jones, senior lecturer in psychology at Western Sydney University told PsyPost. “I’ve been puzzled and confused by the continuing support and admiration that Donald Trump’s supporters hold for him, despite the many accusations that he has engaged in sexual assault, corruption, and other immoral and illegal activities. I wanted to give those supporters a chance to explain in their own words why they support him.”
While there have been previous studies on cognitive dissonance, PsyPost notes they typically give participants only one chance to deflect — helpful for studying the decision itself, but not so much the logic behind it. These three studies made use of open-ended questioning, meaning the Trump supporters surveyed had much more wiggle room to explain away their preconceived notions.
Going forward, Harmon-Jones says more work is needed to separate the findings on cognitive dissonance from the Trump-themed line of questioning.
“Would supporters of Barack Obama or Bill Clinton react similarly if they learned of similar accusations against them?” she posed to PsyPost. “That remains to be tested.”
More on psych studies: Psychologists Found Something Horrible About the Kind of Men Seeking Trad Wives
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