Why the "Need for Chaos" Is Eating American Politics

Plain English with Derek Thompson

The Ringer

News Commentary, News

4.8 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 1 March 2024

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Michael Bang Petersen Producer: Devon Baroldi Links: https://politicalsciencenow.com/the-need-for-chaos-and-motivations-to-share-hostile-political-rumors/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/need-for-chaos-political-science-concept/677536/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Brian Curtis from The Ringer, and I want to tell you about the Press Box podcast.
0:06.0	The Press Box is a podcast for anybody who likes news, whether it's about sports or politics or pop culture and wants to understand how that news really gets made
0:17.6	We have new shows every Monday and Thursday. We have long interviews with everyone from John Crackhour to Joe Buck.
0:24.0	Your social media feeds are bursting with information every day.
0:27.5	Let us help you sort it out.
0:29.5	Join us on the press box. Today's episode is about one of the most interesting papers I've read in the last year, one that I
0:44.2	literally cannot stop thinking about as I follow and read about American culture and
0:48.9	politics and media. It's an idea called The Need for Chaos.
0:55.0	And I think if I give this idea its proper do and explain it correctly in the next 40 minutes or so, you will feel like I do that this concept
1:06.0	seems to haunt wherever you look. So as I wrote in the Atlantic last week, this story
1:11.0	begins with a political scientist in Denmark named Michael Bang Peterson.
1:15.6	Peterson, whose papers I found really uniformly fascinating, wanted to understand why people, specifically Americans, share conspiracy theories on the internet.
1:26.0	And he and a few other researchers in Denmark and France created a study that showed Americans several obviously false stories, conspiracy
1:34.0	theories, about Democrats and Republicans.
1:36.0	Stories about Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump.
1:40.0	And the subjects were asked, what do you share these stories online?
1:46.2	So Peterson and his researchers had a hypothesis.
1:49.6	They assumed that they would find typical polarization patterns.
1:53.0	The left believes nonsense about the right,
1:55.5	and the right believes nonsense about the left,
1:57.5	and maybe there's some imbalance between the two
1:59.5	that's important to tease out,
	...

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