The “Need for Chaos” and Motivations to Share Hostile Political Rumors
By M. Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen, Kevin Arceneaux. 2018
87 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Why are some people motivated to share hostile political rumors, such as conspiracy theories and other derogatory news stories? Previous research mostly focuses on the thesis that people’s partisan identities motivate them to share hostile political rumors as a way to tarnish their political opponents. In this manuscript, we demonstrate disruptive psychological motivations also play an important, but often overlooked, role in the spread of hostile rumors. We argue that many individuals who feel socially and politically marginalized are motivated to circulate hostile rumors because they wish to unleash chaos to “burn down” the entire established political order in the hope they can gain status in the process. We conducted 8 large studies (including a nationally representative study) to show that some individuals are predisposed to have a Need for Chaos when facing social isolation and discontent, and that this need is the strongest predictor of explicit motivations to share hostile political rumors. Panel and experimental data show that chaotic motivations reflect an interplay between traits related to status-seeking and states of social exclusion. Consistent with the rising inequality in the United States and beyond, we find that these motivations are strikingly prevalent. To stem the tide of hostile political rumors on social media, the present findings suggest that real-world policy solutions are needed to address the growing social and political frustrations of democratic populations.
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/24207f0ddc13982b1460f64afc3fbb36545714f3
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Citations in the corpus
- Cognitive attraction and online misinformation (2018, background): “The motivations to share political conspiracies are different from the motivations to share a ‘news’ about a morgue employee cremated by mistake (Petersen et al., 2018).”
- COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in the UK: the Oxford coronavirus explanations, attitudes, and narratives survey (Oceans) II (2020, background): “Eleven items assessing ‘ need for chaos ’ , understood as a desire to bring down the established political order in order to increase one ’ s own social status, are rated on a scale from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (7) (Petersen et al., 2020).”
- The Psychology of Fake News. (2021, background): “This purposeful sharing could be motivated, for example, by an effort to further one's political agenda [18], to sow chaos [65], or to share news that would be interesting if it turned”