Before and after the 2016 US Presidential Election, this research examined Trump and Clinton supporters’ attributions about behavior of each leader, both of whose ethicality had been publicly questioned. American voters (N = 268) attributed significantly more dispositional factors to the outgroup leader than to the ingroup leader. Moreover, when the ingroup candidate won the election (i.e., among Trump supporte...
Leaders often deviate from group norms or social conventions, sometimes inno- vating and sometimes engaging in serious transgressions or illegality. We propose that group members are prone to be more permissive toward both forms of deviance in the case of ingroup leaders compared to other ingroup members or outgroup members and leaders. This granting of “deviance credit” is hypothesized to be underpinned by per...
Two studies examined participants’ evaluations of ingroup or outgroup normative and deviant members and changes in agreement with a prescriptive norm. In Experiment 1 (N = 51), the normative target was either a full or marginal ingroup or outgroup member, and the deviant was a full member. In Experiment 2 (N = 113), both targets were full or marginal members, or one was a full member and the other was marginal....