"A majority of Trump supporters rate blacks as less evolved than whites"

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/11/the_majority_of_trump_supporters_surveyed_described_black_people_as_less.html

Nov. 7 2016 5:00 PM
How Do Trump Supporters See Black People?
“Less evolved,” our survey shows.
By Ashley Jardina, Sean McElwee, and Spencer Piston

...Our research indicates that many whites see blacks as less human than they see members of their own racial group. More than one-third of whites we surveyed rate black people as “less evolved” than they rate whites. Furthermore, substantial proportions of white respondents say that the terms “savage,” “barbaric,” and “lacking self-restraint, like animals” describe black people well. Those who hold these dehumanizing views of black people are disproportionately likely to support Donald Trump.

This idea—which to be clear is absolutely false—was once erroneously supported by science. It was not all that long ago that leading researchers claimed that black people were less evolved than white people and closer to humanity’s apelike ancestors on the evolutionary scale. We suspected, however, that more people still possess some of these beliefs than is generally thought. To assess the extent to which the general public subscribes to these claims in the present day, two of us (Jardina and Piston) conducted a survey of a nationally representative sample of 2,000 non-Hispanic white U.S. adult citizens. The survey (which employed a method developed by Northwestern professor Nour Kteily and colleagues) was administered over the internet and contracted through the firm GfK, whose address-based sampling approach is the gold standard in online survey research.

...There is one group of whites that stands out in the degree to which it holds dehumanizing views of black people: Trump supporters. To measure evaluations of Trump, we asked our subjects to describe how warm they feel toward Trump on a 0-100 scale. Here we compare Trump’s strongest opponents (defined here as those who rate Trump at a 25 or below) to Trump’s strongest supporters (those who rate Trump higher than 75). Twenty-eight percent of white Trump opponents rate blacks as less evolved than they rate whites. In contrast, a majority of Trump supporters—52 percent—rate blacks as less evolved than whites.

We detected substantial levels of dehumanization among Trump supporters through additional survey questions as well. For example, 27 percent of Trump supporters said the phrase “lacking self-restraint, like animals” describes black people well, compared with 8 percent of Trump opponents. Trump supporters were also substantially more likely than Trump opponents to say that the terms “savage” and “barbaric” describe black people well.