So, if I told you that white men with graduate degrees are disproportionately likely to agree on a survey that school shootings are fake events generated by the government and that the severity of the Holocaust has been exaggerated, how would you try to explain it? One approach would be to take their answers at face value and look for how they get their information. Another would be to look at their particular social position and see if they’re responding to threats and pressures unique to their group. But you can also assume their responses are not honest. They don’t actually believe these things, but they get a kick out of providing a transgressive answer.

Saverio Roscigno, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine, raises this possibility when discussing the implications of a paper he recently published called “The Status Foundations of Conspiracy Beliefs.” He gives the example of telling your colleagues at work that you sincerely believe the earth is flat. People might look at you sideways and think less of your cognitive abilities, but you won’t likely face disciplinary actions or group ostracism. However, if you say that Holocaust is largely a hoax, you’re going have some problems. White men with graduate degrees are not likely to believe the earth is flat, and they’re also not likely to pretend to believe it. Even though the downside of expressing such a belief is modest, there’s really no upside to it either. You don’t get the thrill of being transgressive simply by being contrarian.

The theory, then, is that highly educated white men as a group are more likely than others to pursue this kind of transgressive thrill. In support of this, Mr. Roscigno also finds a U-Shape in the responses. White men with graduate degrees who identify with the far left or far right are more likely to embrace taboo conspiracies. To me, that makes intuitive sense, because you need a tolerance for social or career costs to position yourself on the political fringe in the first place. But it can go beyond tolerance for cost to an actual reward for a feeling of breaking norms and expectations.

Now, at the bottom of the sociological ladder, where bogus conspiracies are also disproportionately expressed, there may be nothing to lose. But among highly educated career professionals and academics, such behavior is clearly not serving one’s self-interest. Privately answering a survey question isn’t risky, so the thrill is strictly private, but I think the key is that it scratches an itch. There’s some need or desire to say something offensive, even if no one will know it was you who said it.

Roscigno is following up with more research to better understand the phenomena, and I’ll be interested to see what he discovers. This is in part because I’ve long considered the MAGA movement to be tightly connected to the thrill of transgression. In one sense, Donald Trump’s fans adore him for getting away with things that they’d like to do but cannot. They’d like to cheat on their wives and taxes. They’d like to insult powerful people in the media, business and politics. They’d like to punch down on minorities, the handicapped, gays, the homeless, the uninsured and the unemployed. They’d like to tell people they come from shithole countries. They’d like to wiggle out of even the biggest jam and come out richer and more famous on the other side. They’d even like to spew complete bullshit, lies and nonsense and have people love them for it. At heart, being politically incorrect can be exciting even if you’re just a witness or member of the audience. And what’s better than to be given permission to act like a complete asshole by the president of the United States?

This is really where a lot of the “Trump’s speaks for people like us” is coming from. It also explains the appeal of RFK Jr. who similarly attracts a U-Shaped left/right fringe with his conspiratorialism.

Now, for some, openly aligning oneself with weird beliefs requires a certain degree of privilege. Elon Musk can say whatever he wants. If you live paycheck to paycheck, you have to watch what you say, and that’s why suddenly getting permission to say rotten things can feel so good. It’s a kind of liberation.

There’s an impulse in everyone to want to be a shitty person, at least once in a while, and the MAGA movement relies on this and works to make people act as shitty as possible. There are other political movements that do the exact opposite. They appeal to impulse to be generous and praiseworthy, and try to make people as good as possible. This is why the quality of leadership is so important. Because good leaders actually make people better people. They don’t reward or encourage bad behavior so we have less bad behavior. I don’t think this is complicated.

There may some other explanations for why white men with graduate degrees are disproportionately expressing asshole beliefs on survey questions, like the way they use the internet or the their feeling of status loss in a diversifying country, but I really think the thrill of transgression is something the privileged can pursue to a greater extent than the average person, and I think the thrill of transgression needs more investigation if we want to beat back the negative influence of Trump and his MAGA movement and get this country back to decency and proper function.