Since President Donald Trump took office a few weeks ago, the administration’s frenetic activity, which has included withdrawing from global agreements and slashing slashing federal jobs and funding, has left many people reeling. Others, though, seem to be reveling in the chaos. According to political scientists, at least some of this chaos-seeking behavior may be intricately tied to people’s sense of losing their footing in society. And that sense, in turn, has ties to rising inequality and globalization.
“Chaos is a strategy that some people use to account for a perceived loss in status,” says political scientist Kevin Arceneaux of the research university Sciences Po in Paris, France. “Their reaction to that is to then start to create trouble, as a way to turn the cart on its head and try to reclaim their place.”
Most people prefer order, Arceneaux says. But about 15 percent of the U.S. population gravitates toward chaos, or “a desire for a new beginning through the destruction of order and established structures,” Arceneaux and his team reported in 2021 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. The team reached that conclusion after developing a scale to measure people’s desire for chaos. Some 5,000 Americans rated their level of agreement with statements such as, “I think society should be burned to the ground,” “I get a kick when natural disasters strike foreign countries” and “Sometimes I just feel like destroying beautiful things.”
Those highest in what Arceneaux calls chaos-seeking behavior — 5 percent of the roughly 5,000 Americans surveyed — seem keen to generate mayhem for mayhem’s sake without worrying about who gets hurt in the process, the team found. Meanwhile, roughly 10 percent of the people surveyed desire chaos but lack any ill intent, Arceneaux says. They just think society is too broken to be fixed. “These folks want society to start over, but they don’t want to hurt people,” Arceneaux says.
Science News spoke to Arceneaux to understand the role individual desires for chaos might be playing at this moment in U.S. and global history. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
SN: What prompted your team to start studying chaos?
Arceneaux: It was probably early 2017. We had decided to start this research project to study misinformation. What was in the news at that time was that social media had been used for circulating a lot of false narratives. That really was the thing that we were interested in studying. And we conceptualized this concept [as] “need for chaos.”
We started to dig into the academic literature on social marginalization [and] status seeking. The idea here is that there are some individuals who feel like they’re losing status. And this is a perception. These don’t need to be people that are really destitute. They can actually be, in an absolute sense, well off. These individuals’ reaction to that perceived loss is to then try to create trouble.
Then we developed … the scale and we did a bunch of pilot studies. And then what we showed through a series of studies is that these individuals, clearly, their motivation for sharing misinformation is to just really stir up trouble, and they don’t care if it’s true or not.
Thankfully, it’s not a big group of people. At the same time, you don’t need a big group of people to create chaos.
SN: You’ve analyzed how the need for chaos correlates with certain personality traits. According to your work, what characterizes chaos seekers?
Arceneaux: There are two types of people that are high in chaos. A small group of people score highest on the scale. They want both society to burn to the ground and to destroy beautiful things. There’s another group that’s a little bit bigger that we called “rebuilders.” They tended to say yes to burning institutions to the ground. But they don’t want the malevolence. They don’t get a kick out of natural disasters striking countries and things like that.
Chaos seekers seem to be driven by ego. They feel like they’re not being respected as much as they feel they should. But need for chaos is not a personality trait, where in every single context people are going to seek chaos. Instead, it’s something that psychologists call a character adaptation. These adaptations help people respond to a particular context. Right now, factors such as rising inequality and globalization are making life feel more precarious. So people high in darker personality traits might be responding by dialing up the chaos.
Neither group [of chaos-seekers] is driven by a political ideology. In 2016 and in 2020, scoring high on the scale did not correlate with voting for Donald Trump. We have preliminary findings showing that people who scored high on the scale in 2024 were more likely to vote for Donald Trump. We don’t know what changed.
SN: Your research also suggests that chaos seekers skew white and male. Why do you think that is?
Arceneaux: If you look at the Black individuals in our sample, they’re much more likely to be concerned about the group versus the individual than white individuals. There’s historically been much more emphasis on this notion of linked fate, that what happens to the group affects the individual.
Among Black men and Black women – and it looks like white women too – if they feel like their group has lost, that’s negatively correlated with need for chaos. And this seems to fit with what we know from the “linked fate” literature … You’re a minority in a country where you feel like you’re losing. Creating chaos isn’t going to help you. It makes you a target.
White men as a demographic show the strongest correlation between status loss and need for chaos. This fits with our theory. It’s the personal status loss that motivates people. White men [more often] care that they individually are losing out.
SN: Can this theory shed light on the current U.S. situation?
Arceneaux: There’s no paper yet. But with [political scientist] Roy Truex, who is at Princeton [University], we did a study throughout the 2024 election.Starting in late July 2024, we surveyed 500 people across the United States every week up until Inauguration Day. Just before and after the election, I think we surveyed every day.
We included the chaos scale on those surveys, questions to measure feelings of status loss and questions about people’s perception of their absolute status. We found people who feel like they are low in status are more likely to be high in need for chaos, which is consistent with the theory.
There’s an old literature in social psychology around a concept called relative deprivation. It gets at this idea that when people think about how they’re doing, they think about it relative to other people. If you’re my boss and you say, “I’m going to give you a 5 percent raise,” that would be nice, right? But then if I find out that you gave my officemate a 10 percent raise, I feel like I’m being screwed over. That’s classic relative deprivation. What’s interesting, though, is people who believe that they are high in status also score higher in need for chaos. Their concern seems to be losing that advantage.
This is what happens when you have high levels of inequality. On the bottom, it creates a widespread sense of relative deprivation, of losing out … But it also means that people at the very top can also become very worried about losing those things. Because the alternative to inequality is to share. Think about the arguments around DEI in the United States. People at the top might wonder: What does creating a more inclusive space mean for me?
When I looked at this data, I thought, This is a really excellent explanation for why we have a marriage of two forces across the world. On the one hand, there’s a group of people who do feel that the deck is stacked against them. And for them, starting over again or getting rid of the system as it is makes sense. But Elon Musk is the richest man in the world and Donald Trump is not poor. In Europe, a lot of the people who are leading the populist charge are not bad off either. One of the things that’s possible is these folks recognize that they’ve benefited and they want to keep that. That’s created strange bedfellows.
SN: In your view, is there anything people can do to mitigate the chaos?
Arceneaux: I think that we have to listen to some of these folks. It’s easy to dismiss when people are saying, “Look, I’m getting screwed over,” and say in response, “You look like you’re doing pretty good.”
A lot of people … are asking: “What are these liberal democratic institutions doing for me?” What you get is a preference for a strong leader that will come in and clean things up. And we see that on the left and the right. In Venezuela, when Hugo Chavez came in, he was not on the right.
I think we often think about this from the notion that there’s nothing wrong with our democratic institutions. But I think we have to turn a little bit of attention to understanding why people are unhappy.