"Yes, Donald Trump Is Making White People More Hateful/A new study finds empirical evidence of the 'Trump Effect.'"

So says The Nation.

Shortly before the 2016 election, [Brian Schaffner, a scholar at UMass Amherst,] randomly divided almost 1,200 non-Hispanic white respondents into four groups. He showed one, the control group, three relatively anodyne statements made by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during the course of the campaign. The second group was given the same three statements, and also shown an excerpt of Trump’s infamous Mexican rapists speech. A third group saw a different inflammatory statement, “Our great African-American President hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore.” And the final group was shown all five.

Schaffner then asked respondents to say something in their own words about African-Americans, Mexicans, white people, politicians, the middle class and millennials.... The results were surprising. Respondents who were exposed to Trump’s comments about “thugs” in Baltimore weren’t affected by that inflammatory statement to a significant degree, but those who read his tirade about Mexicans were. They made significantly more negative comments about the groups in question than those who only saw more conventional campaign rhetoric. Eight hundred people were recruited to rate the comments on a scale from “very negative” to “very positive,” and Schaffner averaged out the results....

Schaffner’s own explanation is that Trump is giving respondents tacit permission to be bigots. “People aren’t always sure what the norms are in terms of what’s OK and what’s not OK to say,” he says. “There have been several psychological studies showing that people tend to take cues from their peers when they’re asked to talk about other groups. When they hear somebody saying something offensive about some group, then they basically say to themselves, ‘oh, I can say that because this other person said it so it must be OK.’ And I think something similar is going on here. People hear a politician who is running for president using this inflammatory terminology, and they think, ‘well, if a major party’s presidential candidate is using this language than it must be acceptable for me.’ So I think people are changing their understanding about what the norms allow for, or preclude, based on what they’re hearing from Trump.”

The Nation's headline is bad. I'm only seeing reason to think people became more outwardly expressive. Who knows when people are "more hateful"? You could feel a lot of hate but hold your tongue. Maybe the most hateful people keep it to themselves.