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It's official - Donald Trump makes Americans embarrassed. Seriously, who would have guessed?
After an analysis of tens of millions of tweets sent out from US accounts before and after the election that saw Donald Trump become president, between June 2015, and December 2017, researchers found a 45 per cent increase in mentions of the word 'embarrassed', or other variants on it.
In fact, mentions increased from an average of 909 tweets per million before his election, to an average of 1,319 after it, reports the Guardian.
The survey couldn't confirm Trump as being the sole driver of a shift towards an embarrassed persuasion among inhabitants of the USA, however, they did present some convincing evidence.
After a deep dive into the data, they noticed that three spikes in 'embarrassment' coincided with three peaks in social media and news references to the 45th president of the United States.
The first spike was on October 10 2016, the day after the presidential debates. The second occurred on March 18 2017, which coincided with Trump apparently refusing to shake hands with Angela Merkel. The third was also Trump-related, and happened on May 28 2017, the day after Trump appeared to shove the president of Montenegro at a Nato meeting.
Speaking to the Guardian, the author of the study Frieder Paulus, a social neuroscientist at Lübeck University in Germany, said:
You can clearly see that the spikes are related to Trump.
He added:
Compared with the Obama administration, there was an increase in embarrassment since Trump was elected. Not only does it increase on average, you have very strong spikes in embarrassment too.
Well, that seems to settle it. Americans are embarrassed by their orange overlord.
With that hairdo, is anyone really surprised?
HT The Guardian
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