A study measured the ‘Need for Chaos’ that leads people to spread online misinformation and vote for politicians like Trump.
We all feel lost sometimes. Forgotten, disengaged from society, alienated. From there, it can be a short distance to anger, or something more intense than anger—rage, even hatred, directed against yourself, against the system, against people who aren’t like you and and don’t understand you, against everything. To quote Alfred in The Dark Knight, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” According to a recent study, wanting to watch the world burn is a frighteningly common feeling—and it might explain a lot about the political instability America and the world are grappling with.
The paper, “A ‘Need for Chaos’ and the Sharing of Hostile Political Rumors in Advanced Democracies,” came out in August 2018 but just won an award from the American Political Science Association—and subsequently got highlighted by the New York Times’s Thomas Edsall. The researchers, from Denmark’s Aarhus University and Temple University, were interested in why people spread “hostile political rumors” online. One explanation is that in an increasingly polarized age, partisans are more likely to share nasty bits of gossip—true or not—about their political opponents. But the paper’s authors favor a much more disturbing conclusion: The impulse to share hateful rumors “are associated with ‘chaotic’ motivations to ‘burn down’ the entire established democratic ‘cosmos’… This extreme discontent is associated with motivations to share hostile political rumors, not because such rumors are viewed to be true but because they are believed to mobilize the audience against disliked elites.”
Harry Cheadle – VICE – September 4, 2019.
