low info non-college

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see nihilism, fear of losing status

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A video of a by anti-Elon Musk protesters was posted on March 18, 2025, by an account on X called EndWokeness.

The next day Musk replied to the post, “Some people just want to watch the world burn,” an iconic line from the 2008 Batman film “The Dark Knight.” Alfred, the Wayne family’s faithful butler, says the line to Bruce Wayne – Batman – to describe the motivations behind the Joker’s chaotic acts of violence.

Musk – and Alfred – was right. Some people do, in fact, say they think that society should be burned to the ground. It’s part of a psychological measure political psychologists created called “need for chaos.”

New data from the Center for Political Communication at the University of Delaware suggests that those people – the ones who want society to burn – are the ones with more, not less, trust in Musk. They also report more trust in the Department of Government Efficiency, the government entity Musk advises, which the Trump administration claims it created to cut government waste and fraud.

Yet, critics point out that Musk and DOGE’s seemingly indiscriminate approach to spending cuts risks damaging the infrastructure necessary for American innovation.

This desire to watch the world burn doesn’t come out of nowhere.

Fear of losing status

Somewhat like the Joker, whose perpetual sense of victimhood – “You wanna know how I got these scars?” – drove his need for chaos and destruction, people can develop a need for chaos in response to a sense that they are losing.

When political psychologists introduced this concept of “need for chaos” in 2021, they described it not as a psychological trait, but as a character adaptation that occurs when some people experience a cultural and political situation that makes them feel like they are losing status and power. For some people, this feeling triggers a desire to “burn it all down” – “it” being society, institutions, the world – maybe to rebuild it all anew, or maybe just to see it all destroyed.

Only a small percentage of the U.S. population – less than 15% – tends to score high in need for chaos. But even so, understanding this minority is important to gaining insight into this political moment.

For example, people who score high in need for chaos exhibit greater support for political violence and a willingness to knowingly share hostile and false information online. And in our data, those higher in need for chaos report holding more trust in Musk, DOGE and Trump than people who score lower in the need for chaos measure.

Who wants to burn it down

We are political psychologists who study the link between psychological traits and political beliefs. Last month, the University of Delaware’s Center for Political Communication ran a national survey that we designed to understand where the public stands on various political issues and how those beliefs relate to psychological traits, including need for chaos.

In our national study of 1,600 Americans conducted between Feb. 27-March 5, 2025, by YouGov, we asked respondents how much they agreed or disagreed with the following statements:

• “I fantasize about a natural disaster wiping out most of humanity such that a small group of people can start all over”

• “I think society should be burned to the ground”

• “We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions; we need to tear them down and start over”

• “I need chaos around me – it is too boring if nothing is going on”

Similar to prior work by author Kevin Arceneaux and his colleagues, our data shows that a very small number – fewer than 20% of the sample – agrees strongly or agrees somewhat with each item.

However, looking at need for chaos among groups of varying ages, education levels and media habits, we find the highest need for chaos scores among people under age 40, those with less education, and those who pay the least attention to politics.

IFrame Content

Burning it down through government policy

Our new data also shows that while people highest in need for chaos report having more trust in Musk, DOGE, and President Trump, these chaos-seeking folks report having less trust in “people in general,” journalists or the federal government. These findings hold even when statistically accounting for other factors, among them party, race, gender, education and ideology.

Musk’s penchant for wielding chainsaws as a symbol of DOGE’s work provides some insight into why chaos seekers may like what they see in Musk.

It’s not clear exactly what Musk’s aim is with his work at DOGE, as he eliminates the jobs of hundreds of thousands of government workers.

What is clear, however, is that by many accounts, the mass firings and the gutting of agencies, like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Institute for Peace, are sowing chaos. And a significant portion of Americans want just that.

Dannagal G. Young, Professor of Communication and Political Science, University of Delaware and Kevin Arceneaux, Director of the Center for Political Research and Professor of Political Science, Sciences Po

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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...According to a post-2024 election survey, 45 percent of swing voters (ie, people who were open to voting for Trump or Harris) said they got their news from social media. The number was even higher, 52 percent, among people who had voted for Trump for the first time ever. By contrast, only 39 percent of swing voters watched local news and just 15 percent said they read national newspapers like the Times.:

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Low information voters, also known as misinformation voters, are people who may vote yet are generally poorly informed about issues. The phrase is mainly used in the United States and has become popular since the mid-1990s.

Origins

American pollster and political scientist Samuel Popkin coined the term "low-information" in 1991 when he used the phrase "low-information signaling" in his book The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns. Low-information signaling referred to cues or heuristics used by voters in lieu of substantial information to determine whom to vote for. Examples include voters liking Bill Clinton for eating at McDonald's and perceiving John Kerry and Barack Obama as elitist for wind-surfing and golfing, respectively.^[1]

Meaning

The ideological views of most low-information voters tend to be more moderate than those of high-information voters. Low-information voters are less likely to vote and when they do they generally vote for a candidate they find personally appealing. They tend to be swing voters and they tend to vote split-ticket more than well-informed voters do. Researchers attribute this to low-information voters not having developed clear cut ideological preferences.^[2][3][4]

Linguist George Lakoff has written that the term is a pejorative mainly used by American liberals to refer to people who vote conservative against what liberals assume to be their own interests and assumes they do it because they lack sufficient information. Liberals, he said, attribute the problem in part to deliberate Republican efforts at misinforming voters.^[5]

In a 2011 article titled "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult", thirty-year Republican House of Representatives and Senate staffer Mike Lofgren characterized low-information voters as anti-intellectual and hostile-to-science "religious cranks" and claimed Republicans are deliberately manipulating low information voters to undermine their confidence in American democratic institutions.^[6]

A 2012 paper by six American political scientists called "A Theory of Political Parties: Groups, Policy Demands and Nominations in American Politics" challenged the idea that Republicans want a low-information electorate and argued instead that both major American parties do. Noting that 95% of incumbents in the highly polarized House of Representatives win re-election despite voters' preference for centrist representation, the paper theorizes that voters' infrequent penalizing of extremist behaviour represents not approval, but a lack of attention and information. This, the paper says, is supported by the fact that when congressional districts and media markets overlap to create more informed electorates, extremist House members are at much greater risk for defeat. The paper proposes that in the American political system interest groups and activists are the key actor and that the electorate is uninformed and bamboozled.^[7]

Effects

A 1992 study found that in the absence of other information, voters used candidates' physical attractiveness to draw inferences about their personal qualities and political ideology.^[8] A study performed using logistic regression analysis on data from the 1986 through 1994 American National Election Studies found that low-information voters tend to assume female and black candidates are more liberal than male and white candidates of the same party.^[9] A 2003 study that analyzed precinct-level data from city council elections held in Peoria, Illinois between 1983 and 1999 found that the placement of candidates' names on the ballot was a point of influence for low-information voters.^[10] An analysis concerned with the "puzzling finding" that incumbent legislators in mature democracies charged with corruption are not commonly punished in elections found that less-informed voters were significantly more likely to vote for incumbents accused of corruption than were their better-informed counterparts, presumably because they did not know about the allegations.^[11]

Voting correctly

Related to the concept of a low information voter, voting correctly is a concept from political psychology that refers to a vote decision "that is the same as the choice which would have been made under conditions of full information."^[12] Measurements of correct votes are used to determine how accurate low information voters are at determining the candidate or party that best represents the voters' interests.

...I reached out to Scott, who works in private equity. He stuck by his guns. “I love Monica,” he told me. “But I think Monica goes directly to sources of information.” This, he suggested, was not the right approach. “Use common sense,” he went on. “Food is much higher now. There’s so many things against restaurants right now.” The Biden-Harris Administration was at fault, he concluded. “They created this.” He mentioned a right-wing YouTube channel called Liberal Hivemind, where he gets some political news. The only other person from the Facebook thread whom I reached was Heather, a real-estate agent. She was friendly on the phone, and we spoke as she prepared for a cookout she had planned that evening. She told me that she is “very, very conservative,” and, like Scott, would be voting for Donald Trump, but that she doesn’t consume a lot of news beyond what she gleans from the right-wing TV network Newsmax. She also engages in political discussions on Facebook, adding, “I probably shouldn’t.” She went on, “It’s hard for me to even watch the news, because it kind of nauseates me.”

A few weeks later, Sheppard alerted me to another Facebook conversation. This time, someone had posted a chart that compared the Biden and Trump Administrations using metrics like inflation rates, average hourly earnings, and the costs of gas, groceries, and electricity. The chart made a compelling case for Trump. But there was a problem: a label added by the platform’s fact checkers noted that it included “partly false information.” Sheppard pointed that out in a comment. A man named Danny responded, “Whole Lotta stuff be labeled ‘not true’ on Facebook. Almost like Facebook has its own agenda.” Sheppard asked him what news sources he trusted. “I don’t trust any media . . . nor google . . . nor Facebook,” he said. “I trust what I see.” Sheppard later told me, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I’d be electing my cat if I only relied on the behavior that I see!”

In April, NBC News released the results of a poll that looked at how a thousand respondents consumed political news, and how they planned to vote. At the time, Biden was the overwhelming favorite among people who read newspapers, watched network news, and followed online news sites. Trump, meanwhile, led among those who frequently got their information from social media, cable news, and YouTube. The poll also showed that Trump most dominated among a subset of people described as “low-information voters.” Definitions of this group vary among experts, some of whom begin by pointing to the ubiquity of ignorance. “If you know what the F.T.C. did last week, you’re a freak,” David Schleicher, a professor at Yale Law School, told me. There were gaps in basic political knowledge even among law professors he knew. “It’s just a matter of degree,” he said. Nonetheless, he continued, low-information voters tend to have “fewer observations about politics with which to make vote choices.”

Joshua Kalla, a professor of political science at Yale, notes that being low-information is not necessarily a problem. A better question is whether voters know about the specific things that matter to them. “You may think, incorrectly, that the 2020 election was stolen—but, if you know which party will cut your taxes and that’s all you care about, then does it matter?” Kalla asked. “The important thing is that you’re informed on issues you care about.” Of course, finding good information is increasingly difficult. Decades ago, there were just a few channels on television; the Internet has broadened the choices and lowered the standards. “Now people might seek out information about a particular candidate on a particular policy and think they have genuine info, but they’re being misinformed or misled,” Kalla said. The decline of newspapers has led to a decrease in split-ticket voting: voters know less about the candidates in their districts, so they simply vote along party lines. This has helped to nationalize politics. Cable news, which voters increasingly rely on, “carries a lot less information than the New York Times,” Schleicher said.

Richard Fording, a professor of political science at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, who has written about low-information voters, told me that they “generally just vote in Presidential-election years—if they vote at all.” These voters seem to have once been spread pretty evenly between the political parties. Low-information voters who turned out for Bill Clinton in 1992 may have known little more than that he played the saxophone; some George W. Bush voters may have simply associated the former governor of Texas with the South. Partisan pundits have long blamed the successes of candidates they oppose on such voters. In 2012, the late right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh pointed to them to explain Barack Obama’s popularity. “We’re gonna have to redefine low-information voter,” Limbaugh said. “They’re not just people watching TMZ. In fact, I would venture to say that over half of the average, ordinary Democrats voting for Obama have no clue what they’re really doing.”

By 2016, Fording told me, low-information voters appeared to be moving to the right. (His analysis specifically examined white low-information voters, whom he defined as those unable to correctly answer two of the three following questions: how long is a U.S. senator’s term, which party currently controls the House, and which party controls the Senate.)

“Trump’s whole playbook was to attract these people,” Fording stated. Low-information voters, he found, are more likely to embrace stereotypes of other groups, and less likely to fact-check claims made by politicians. “Trump was kind of the perfect candidate for them,” he said. After the “Access Hollywood” tape leaked, and voters largely stuck with Trump, Fording dug deeper into the low-information category. He came across a metric in psychology called the “need for cognition” scale. “A question that really caught my attention on the scale is an agree or disagree: ‘Thinking is not my idea of fun,’ ” Fording recalled. He and a colleague ran a study to see whether agreement with the statement correlated with support for Trump. It did.

Fording admits that the concept “sounds very condescending.” But, he told me, “it’s been extensively studied for decades: people vary in terms of the enjoyment they get out of searching for new information.” It’s not a measure of intelligence, and, though it correlates with education level, it’s not the same thing: some low-information voters have college degrees. Whatever their education, low-need-for-cognition voters are less likely to seek out alternative views, and more likely to trust people they respect. In November of 2016, as Fording had anticipated, they showed up in significantly larger numbers for Donald Trump than for Hillary Clinton. Given that they are not highly mobilized voters, Fording said, “it was kind of an impressive feat Trump pulled off.”

Americans have been believing bad information since long before birtherism, or the idea that the 2020 election was stolen. How many people, Schleicher asked me, believe conspiracy theories about the assassination of J.F.K.? “More than you’d think,” he said. But, he cautioned, “this does not mean people are stupid.” He brought up Joseph Schumpeter, the famous Austrian economist and political scientist from the nineteen-thirties, who found that many people demonstrate a high degree of intelligence in their day-to-day business affairs, but suddenly sound like fools when they talk about politics. Schumpeter wondered why. “The answer is they have incentives to know something about their business,” Schleicher said. “And their incentive to know specifics about politics is extremely weak.”

The stakes, in any case, are high. “Lower-information voters may only account for a one- or two-point difference in this election, in the end,” Schleicher said. “But that could be decisive.”

Jan Pourquoi runs a small carpet factory and a logistics business in Dalton, Georgia. Dalton calls itself “the carpet capital of the world,” and, like nearby Rome, has about forty thousand residents. Pourquoi, who is now in his sixties, moved there from Belgium nearly four decades ago, and he’s cultivated a Tocquevillian view of his adopted home and its politicians. Some of them he has come to detest. In 2022, Pourquoi paid for a thousand signs to be produced and distributed around the district, which, as best he could recall, read “Save Democracy! Stop the Lies of Marjorie Taylor Greene & Her Treasonous Cult.” “I was a Republican,” Pourquoi told me. “But she and Trump are too far.” He noted an increase in the G.O.P.’s “political misfits, power-seeking opportunists, and”—before Tim Walz made it a mainstream critique—“weirdos.”

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no lnx

What’s Wrong With the Meritocracy

By Arlie Russell Hochschild

Published Sept. 15, 2020

THE TYRANNY OF MERIT

What’s Become of the Common Good?

By Michael J. Sandel

In an eighth-grade math class at Pacific Palisades junior high in the late 1960s, Michael J. Sandel’s teacher seated students in precise order according to their grades. As their G.P.A.s shifted with the dramatically announced results of every quiz, so did the seating. “I typically shuttled between the second desk and the fourth or fifth,” Sandel recalls, and at age 14, “I thought this was how school worked.”

“The Tyranny of Merit” is like a brilliant response to that misguided but well-meaning math teacher from the viewpoint, as it were, of a kid in some back-row seat of any classroom in a Rust Belt, prairie town or inner-city school in America. What do grades and degrees tell us, Sandel asks, about the widening gap between rich and poor, proud and humiliated, trusting and suspicious, opponent and devotee of Donald Trump?

Some have called Sandel a “rock star moralist.” Without guitar or shiny shirt, the soft-toned but hard-hitting Harvard philosophy professor has packed St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the Sydney Opera House in Australia and a 14,000-seat outdoor stadium in Seoul, South Korea.

One reason, perhaps, is that many of us need what he does so well: help us grapple with the unexpected and uncomfortable questions that history delivers us. Is it OK for parents to try to make a genetically perfect child (“The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering”)? Is it OK to pay your kid to read (“What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets”)? Now, in his new book, he asks: Is it OK to claim that our fine grades and degrees are all our own doing, so that we owe little or nothing in return?

What, he wonders, if the highly educated harden into a hereditary aristocracy? And what if this occurs under a flag of fairness, during a time when B.A.s and higher degrees are ever more closely tied to income and prestige? Let’s set aside the case of rich parents who bribe corrupt officials or donate huge sums to get their child into a good college. Let’s focus instead, Sandel writes, on the inequity that creeps in without breaking any rules. At Princeton and Yale, for example, more students come from families in the top 1 percent of income than from the bottom 60 percent. Two-thirds of students in all the Ivy League schools come from families in the top 20 percent. This is very largely because of the head start woven into upper-income life itself: engaging dinner conversation, better schools, private tutors, foreign travel.

Sandel is not about guilt-tripping anxious parents of front-row kids; they’re suffering too, he says. But the credentialed have come to imagine themselves as smarter, wiser, more tolerant — and therefore more deserving of recognition and respect — than the noncredentialed. One reason for this, he suggests, lies in our American “rhetoric of rising.”

Both rich and poor parents tell their kids, if you try hard enough, you can achieve your goals. For the upper strata, things may work out, but for the downwardly mobile blue collar and poor, there’s a Catch-22. If they fail to reach their goals — which a torpid economy almost guarantees — they blame themselves. If only I could have gotten that degree, they say. Even the poorly educated, Sandel notes, look down on the poorly educated.

Donald Trump has reached out to this group with open arms — “I love the poorly educated.” He has harvested their demoralization, their grief and their shame, most certainly if they are white. But, Sandel notes, two-thirds of all American adults lack four-year degrees. And in the wake of automation, in real wages, the white man without a B.A. earns less now than he did in 1979. The dignity of his labor has steeply declined. And since 1965, high-school-educated men in the very prime of life — 25 to 54 — have been slipping out of the labor force, from 98 percent in 1965 to 85 percent in 2015.

Of all Americans whose highest degree is a high school diploma, in 2017 only 68 percent worked. And with rising deaths of despair, many are giving up on life itself. So you who are highly educated, Sandel concludes, should understand that you’re contributing to a resentment fueling the toxic politics you deplore. Respect the vast diversity of talents and contributions others make to this nation. Empathize with the undeserved shame of the less educated. Eat a little humble pie.

But we are left with an important issue Sandel does not address: the targeting by the right wing of colleges themselves. This isn’t new: Running parallel to the rise of the meritocracy in America has been a suspicion of the egghead who can’t skin a rabbit, build a house or change a tire. As the historian Richard Hofstadter observed in “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” and Tocqueville before him, many Americans have valued not simply the cultivated intelligence of heroes in a culture of merit but also the creative genius of the “common man” in a culture of survival.

Today this has taken a shockingly partisan turn. For the first time in recent history, the less education you have, the more you lean right and distrust higher education itself. In a 2019 Pew survey, 59 percent of Republicans (and Republican-leaning independents) agree that “colleges have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country these days,” whereas only 18 percent of Democrats (and those leaning left) agree.

So now’s a good time for both sides to sit down for a very serious talk, with “The Tyranny of Merit” required reading for all. And invited from inner-city, suburban and rural schools across the land should be those who warmed seats both in the front row and in the back.

Arlie Russell Hochschild’s most recent book is “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.”