Cambridge Study: Trump and Biden Supporters Show Digital Unity
In 2024, Trump and Biden supporters rallied online within their own groups, expressing unity and solidarity during Donald Trump’s assassination attempts and Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race.
New research by Cambridge scientists has shown that Trump and Biden supporters in 2024 showed great digital solidarity within their group. Instead of political divisions and hostility, positive emotions such as solidarity and unity became the driving force during these events.
As scientists from the Social Decision Lab at the University of Cambridge explained in the study, they collected over 62,000-precisely 62,118-public posts from 484 Facebook accounts of hundreds of American politicians, commentators, and media outlets before and after these events. Their goal? To find out how these two major events influenced the behavior of digital users.
In a press release, the psychologists point out that the results show that positive emotions such as unity can break through hostility on social networks. However, a significant disruptive event is required to spark a collective response, particularly when a community’s well-being is perceived to be under threat.
“It’s crucial to challenge the idea that online negativity sells universally.”
Malia Marks is a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge and the lead author of the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
When asked how these findings could be useful to politicians in their work and communication with the public, Marks said it’s crucial to challenge the idea that online negativity sells universally. “We’ve shown that, under certain conditions, people crave unity. People are not always looking to derogate their opposition. Rather, they sometimes want to build up those around them. For those who entered politics to make positive changes in their communities, this should be very exciting: appealing to constituents’ better nature is not a waste of time, but an important part of building social identity,” Marks told Unknown Focus.
The study found that immediately after the assassination attempt on Trump, Republican-affiliated posts that signaled unity received 53% more engagement than those that did not, a 17 percentage point increase compared to the period immediately before the shooting. At the same time, engagement levels for Republican posts attacking Democrats decreased by 23 percentage points compared to just a few days earlier. Then, after Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race, Democratic-affiliated posts expressing solidarity received 91% more engagement than those that did not, a significant 71 percentage point increase compared to the period immediately before his withdrawal.
Could this behavior be exploited unethically in the future, and how can we prevent politicians from deliberately creating tensions to win public support?
“Just about any behavioral insight could theoretically be exploited. Some politicians do indeed seek advice from psychologists to refine and target their messaging in evidence-based ways. However, I am less concerned about domestic politicians abusing behavioral sciences than I am concerned about malicious foreign influence campaigns. Chinese propaganda, for instance, already relies heavily on evoking positive, affiliative social emotions. I would say more, but I don’t want to give them any new ideas,” added Marks.
The importance of social media
That analyzing social media can provide valuable insights is also shown by the study Social media campaigning across multiple platforms: evidence from the 2024 European elections, which examines how the shifting nature of social media campaigning is being realized in the context of the European Parliament. “Findings indicate that while more established and centrist legislators engage with voters across more platforms, extremist Eurosceptic voices were more dominant during the 2024 election campaign. This result has important implications for who controls the narrative of European integration,” as noted in the study published in May 2025.
The moment of truth
When asked about her favorite part of the study, Marks said that it is satisfying her curiosity. “When I was watching the news coverage of the 2024 campaign trail chaos, I began to wonder if my colleague Yara’s findings (Social identity correlates of social media engagement before and after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine) from Ukraine would replicate in my home country despite our situational differences— this wasn’t a military invasion or terror attack, which have historically been found to cause this effect. Plus, America’s two political parties are famously polarized and hostile. However, as I saw reactions to the Butler Rally shooting and Biden’s exit on my own social media feed, I began to wonder if a threat to party leadership could be enough to turn even partisan Americans towards solidarity. There’s nothing more exciting for me than the moment of truth when I run the stats and find out whether my hunch was correct,” Marks concluded.
