(2023-02-17) The Need For Chaos And Motivations To Share Hostile Political Rumors

The “Need for Chaos” and Motivations to Share Hostile Political Rumors. Social media provide citizens with power to craft and share news with each other. Unfortunately, this technological transformation has made it easier than before to spread what we call hostile political rumors in a way that goes “farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than truth”

Extant research focuses on how partisan animus affects the likelihood of believing and sharing hostile news

They also reflect the degree to which individuals feel disenfranchised by the entire political system (Uscinski et al. ). In this article, we provide a detailed examination of how anti-systemic sentiments motivate the willingness to share and believe in hostile political rumors.

We outline a theoretical framework about an overlooked psychological strategy for acquiring social status—the incitement of chaos—and demonstrate the relevance of this strategy for contemporary politics. We build on research showing that status-oriented personality traits combined with social rejection can push people toward an escalation of aggressive motivations

We argue that such motivations, when sufficiently strong, take root as a general destructive mindset.

Across eight well-powered studies (including representative studies of the U.S. population), we find evidence that the Need for Chaos emerges in an interplay between status-oriented personality traits and social contexts of real and perceived marginalization and is a strong predictor of willingness to share hostile political rumors, over and beyond partisanship.

alongside growing partisan polarization, democracies have experienced rising levels of income inequality and stagnation in real wages (Peter Turchin ). As social well-being has worsened, some citizens increasingly express feelings of “losing out” and discontent with the political establishment (Kriesi and Schulte-Cloos ). These feelings of status loss and marginalization, even if imagined rather than real, have shaped recent political events

indicators of marginalization, such as lack of trust, predict conspiratorial beliefs beyond the effects of partisanship

individuals’ discontent with the entire political system should motivate sharing of hostile political rumors that they believe could damage the system itself. As a result, these individuals should share hostile political rumors, irrespective of which party it helps or hurts.

Dominance-oriented individuals feel greater entitlement and greater motivation to obtain a superior position within the hierarchy. Marginalization should therefore activate greater feelings of dissatisfaction with the current system among those who are oriented toward dominance-based status.

marginalization can be personal, but it can also be felt with reference to one’s social group. Feelings of insecurity about one’s personal social status have consistently been found to propel people toward extremism (Hogg, Kruglanski, and van den Bos ). At the group level, however, prior research suggests that extremism is often related to inflated appraisals of one’s ingroup (e.g., in the form of collective narcissism) rather than feelings of inferiority (Golec de Zavala and Lantos ). In fact, such inflated group appraisals often reflect personal marginalization.