“Some People Just Want to Watch the World Burn: the Prevalence, Psychology and Politics of the ‘Need for Chaos’”, 2021-02-22 (; similar):
People form political attitudes to serve psychological needs. Recent research shows that some individuals have a strong desire to incite chaos when they perceive themselves to be marginalized by society. These individuals tend to see chaos as a way to invert the power structure and gain social status in the process.
Analysing data drawn from large-scale representative surveys conducted in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, we identify the prevalence of Need for Chaos across Anglo-Saxon societies.
Using Latent Profile Analysis, we explore whether different subtypes underlie the uni-dimensional construct and find evidence that some people may be motivated to seek out chaos because they want to rebuild society, while others enjoy destruction for its own sake. We demonstrate that chaos-seekers are not an unified political group but a divergent set of malcontents. Multiple pathways can lead individuals to ‘want to watch the world burn’.
…We focus on demographic characteristics (gender, age and education) that previous research has found to be linked to perceived marginalization and the motivation to acquire status, both of which are associated with the Need for Chaos. With respect to gender and age, psychological studies often conceptualize status-seeking as part of a ‘young male syndrome’18. Education may also be important because it has become a major fault line in Western democracies, as those without a college degree often feel left out and pushed aside in post-industrial knowledge economies [7,19].
The results of the multinomial logit analysis show a clear pattern across all 4 countries: men and young people are more likely to be classified as RB or HC (see electronic supplementary material for results). Yet as Table 3 shows, the relationship between age and Need for Chaos appears conditional on education. This table shows the predicted probabilities generated from the multinomial logit models where we interacted education with indicators for generation cohorts (Silent, Boomer, Generation X and Millennial generation). We focus on generation cohorts, because ‘trends in political alienation reflect political and historical events or periods which affect all members of the population in a similar fashion’ [20, p. 160]. For the most part, individuals with higher levels of education are more likely to fall in the LC category than individuals with lower levels of education, across generational cohorts. There are some exceptions to this pattern, particularly in Australia where education does not seem to discriminate the LC category very much. In contrast, relative to more educated individuals, less educated individuals seem to be more drawn to the RB category and, to a lesser extent, the HC category. Australia offers yet another exception to this pattern, with more educated individuals gravitating to the HC category at a higher rate than those with less education. Turning our attention to generational differences, we do not observe large or consistent differences across cohorts with respect to RB or HC.
…Consistent with Petersen et al8, we find that individuals who fall in the HC category are much more likely to say that they would take part in an ‘illegal protest’, even relative to those in the RB category.