Trump's 'Locker-Room Banter': A Closer Examination

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The Washington Post recently published an article that brought to light many of the degrading comments that Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, said about women in a conversation with Billy Bush. According to the article, Trump was recorded making inappropriate comments and bragging about how he kisses, gropes, and has sex with many women. After the recording of Trump was leaked to the media, he made a public statement apologizing for the comments that were made; however, according to the news article, instead of giving a genuine apology for his comments Trump pointed out the Bill Clinton had said and done far worse things than the comments that were made in that recording. Trump also used the term “locker-room banter” to describe …show more content…

Dawes, the false consensus effect can be defined as the egotistic bias to overestimate the degree to which people are like us. This bias will lead people to believe that certain opinions, preferences, and habits are normal among other people, when in reality they are not. This concept can be applied to Donald Trump’s apology after the recording was leaked to the media. In his apology, Trump justified his actions by saying that Bill Clinton had done even worse things than he had said in that recording. This false consensus that Trump created in his apology serves as a cognitive bias that increases his self-esteem. By justifying his actions with the actions of someone else he is normalizing the situation and showing the media that he is not the only one that has done this, and that many people do far worse things. In a recent experiment that tested the false consensus effect, Brian Mullen and a group of scientists found that people who engage in a given behavior will estimate that behavior to be more common than it is estimated to be by people who engage in alternative behaviors. In the apology that Trump released after the recording was leaked, he describes his conversation as simple “locker-room banter” and says that he did not mean any of it. By using that specific term, Trump was implying that he was simply engaging in a typical conversation that “average” men partake in. The specific term that he used to describe his comments also served as a way to create a false consensus because it normalized the situation and made it seem like an “average” person could engage in a conversation like that. Donald Trump’s strategy in his apology was to create a false consensus and make it seem as if his recording was not something worthy of so much controversy. By justifying his actions with someone else’s comments and using terms such as “locker-room banter, ” Trump attempted to normalize the situation and make it seem socially

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