Expressive responding in support of Donald Trump: An extended replication of Schaffner and Luks (2018)

Abstract

There is considerable debate about how often survey respondents engage in “expressive responding”: professing to believe something that they do not sincerely believe to show support for their in-group. Nonetheless, there is widespread agreement that one particular study provides particularly compelling evidence for expressive responding. In the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2017 presidential inauguration rally there was considerable controversy about whether this inauguration crowd was the largest ever. At this time, a study was conducted which found that Donald Trump voters were more likely than Hillary Clinton voters or non-voters to indicate that an unlabeled photo of Donald Trump’s 2017 presidential inauguration rally showed more people than an unlabeled photo of Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration rally, despite the latter photo clearly showing more people. However, this study was not pre-registered, meaning that replication is needed to establish the robustness of this important result. In the present study, we conducted an extended replication over two years after Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration rally. We found that despite this delay the original result replicated, albeit with a smaller magnitude. In addition, we extended the earlier study by testing several hypotheses about the characteristics of Republicans who selected the incorrect photo.