This paper examines how social acceptability of xenophobic views affects willingness to publicly express these views, and how normative influence varies conditional on gender. As a proxy for open support of anti-immigrant views we use donations to either an anti-immigrant or pro-immigrant organization. Scholars have repeatedly established the existence of a social norm against the public expression of hate, which makes the expression of prejudice more likely in a private than in a public context. This anti-hate norm prevents people from openly expressing xenophobic attitudes. Based on literature on social norms of prejudice expression, we hypothesize that increasing the perceived social acceptability of prejudice should increase its public expression. Moreover, we test whether the extent of normative influence depends on the gender of the individual.

To this end, we designed an online experiment (N=2283) in which participants were invited to participate in an online forum discussing refugees and immigration issues. We manipulate the social acceptability of expressing prejudice by increasing the proportion of comments considered hateful - violations of the anti-hate norm. In the treated conditions the number of comments considered hateful increased with each consecutive forum page, whereas in the not-treated condition there are no hateful messages and the tone of the comments remains stable across forum pages. Participants are given the possibility to make a donation of 1 euro to a randomly drawn organization that could either be anti- or pro-immigration. Both organizations were selected by means of a pre-experimental online survey (N=200) in which we selected the best-known organizations in Germany: AfD, and ProAsyl. The donation decision was randomized in a manner so different participants were asked to make the decision at different stages of the forum. The treatment conditions thus vary along three dimensions: i) the type of organization, ii) the number of comments the participant sees in the online forum before the decision, and iii) the fraction of those comments that are hateful. Across systematic variations thereof, we measure how the proportion of norm violations of the anti-hate norm influences the decision to donate.

The empirical results show that overall people are more willing to donate to the pro-immigration organization than to the anti-immigration, and that women are particularly reluctant to donate to anti-immigrant organization. Results also show that women reduced even more their donations to this organization when the anti-immigrant comments raised normative concerns. We explain this result as women displaying greater social desirability bias and more willingness to follow the social norm against prejudice. This paper is part of a growing literature on social norms, prejudice expression, peer effects, and support for xenophobic attitudes. Results in this paper can help explain how changes in the normativity of openly expressing xenophobic views can impact the success of right wing populist parties, and how the anti-hate norm could potentially prevent them to gain further support.