Why the “Need for Chaos” Is Eating American Politics

Today’s episode is about one of the most interesting pieces of research I’ve read in the past year. It’s an idea called “need for chaos,” and the truth is that I literally cannot stop thinking about it as I follow American culture, politics, and media. Very briefly, it is the observation that many Americans today embrace conspiracy theories and nihilistic burn-it-all-down messages, not because they are partisans of the left or right, but rather because they’ve become hopelessly cynical (sometimes for very good reason!) about all elite and all major institutions of power. Today’s guest is the Danish political scientist Michael Bang Petersen, who coauthored the paper that introduced this idea.

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In the following excerpt, Derek talks to Michael Bang Petersen about the “need for chaos” theory and why certain people seek to subvert or overturn elite institutions.

Derek Thompson: You and I have spoken a few times, and you always seem to be working on something interesting and surprising. You and I have talked about Denmark and how Denmark was considered both progressive in terms of its COVID precautions, but also, it was one of the first countries to declare that the pandemic was over as a health emergency. I think that was something that really surprised a lot of Americans, and a lot of American liberals in particular. We’ve talked about how Denmark is both very pro-vaccine and anti–vaccine mandate—again, something that is surprising and very interesting to me because I think that in America most people assume that attitudes toward vaccines and vaccine mandates tend to go hand in hand. You’ve done a lot of work on trust, which I find really interesting. Which countries have trust in their political leadership, which countries do not have trust. What trust actually is, where it comes from.

And today, we’re talking about a subject that’s a little bit related to trust and also somewhat related to the pandemic and the elite failures of the pandemic. And that is your theory of “need for chaos” in the American electorate and, really, in electorates around the world. This is, first off, a really fascinating portfolio of subjects. So my first question is, what is your job? What is your research corner? What are the questions that you find or the subjects that you tell people you do political science in?

Michael Bang Petersen: Yeah, so I’m a political scientist, but I have a particular interest in what you can call political psychology, so trying to understand the psychological basis of the way that people think about politics, especially in their own country. But what I’m most interested in within that is what we call the data sites of politics. So I’m particularly interested in not so much trust as mistrust and not so much reliable information as misinformation, trying to figure out, well, why is it that some people are extremely hateful on social media? Everything that can go wrong in an advanced democracy, that is what I find particularly fascinating. And of course, that also informs us, to some extent, about why things sometimes go right.

Thompson: Let’s talk about what can go wrong in democracy and talk about your “need for chaos” paper. It seems you were initially interested in why people share rather blatantly false online conspiracies, and you found a meaningfully large cohort that would share conspiracy theories about both parties, about seemingly any elite, whether they were left, right, center. And what I initially found so interesting about this paper when I saw it is that it seems to violate what I understand to be the first rule of polarization: that polarization, at least in America, creates really clear lines between right and left. The left hates the right, the right hates the left. That’s polarization. And your research said, “No, actually, there’s a sizable group that is, above all, against all elite institutions, on whatever side they happen to exist.” So tell me a little bit more about this research, this initial paper that discovered the need for chaos.

Petersen: Yeah, so in many ways it was one of those things that often happens in science. There’s something you don’t understand, and then you begin to dig deeper into it and suddenly something completely new emerges. And when we began understanding or doing research on the spread of misinformation, what we were expecting was exactly this sort of clear pattern of polarization, this clear partisan divide that you would have, people on the left wing sharing misinformation about elites on the right wing and people on the right wing sharing misinformation about people on the left wing. What we found was exactly as you’re describing, that there is a sizable group that just shares everything. And we tried to see, well, what is it actually that they want? If they don’t just want to hurt one of the established parties within the system, what is it then, really, that they want?

This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Michael Bang Petersen
Producer: Devon Baroldi

Subscribe: Spotify