Episode 399: The Psychology of Incels (Essential Listen)
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You're listening to the Sex and Psychology Podcast, the sex ed you never got in school and won't get anywhere else. I am your host, Dr. Justin Leigh Miller. I am a social psychologist and research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and author of the book, Tell Me What You Want, The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life. Data from all around the world shows that people today are having less sex than they used to, and a growing number of adults report never having had sex at all.

In fact, representative US data finds that among people ages 22 to 34, 10% of men and 7% of women report that they're still virgins. The number of adult virgins is actually at a record high. Just a decade ago, the numbers were only about half of what they are today. However, a lot of the people who are virgins today are folks who would like to be having sex, but for whatever reason, cannot find a partner. In other words, they are involuntarily celibate, or incels for short.

I've started asking about this in some of my own research, and I'm pretty consistently finding that about 3% of men describe themselves as incels. Now, despite incels representing a relatively small proportion of the male population, this group has attracted outsized attention. Countless media reports have emerged in recent years about the rise of incels, many of which have painted this group in a very negative light, characterizing them as misogynists, male supremacists, and people who feel like they're entitled to sex.

However, the truth is more complex. A deeper look at the psychology of incels reveals a group that is struggling with complex mental health issues. In today's show, we're going to revisit one of the most popular interviews I've ever done on this show, which originally aired all the way back in episode 133. This conversation will probably surprise you in a few ways, because it turns out that incels aren't exactly who we think they are.

incels aren't new either. They've always been around, but changes in the modern dating market seem to be creating a lot more of them. So let's take a look inside the minds of incels. My guest is William Costello, a PhD student of individual differences and evolutionary psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a member of Dr. David Buss's evolutionary psychology lab.

He holds a master's in psychology, culture, and evolution from Brunel University London, and his dissertation investigated the psychology of incels. This is going to be another fascinating conversation that you won't want to miss. Hi, William, and welcome to the Sex and Psychology podcast.

Hi, Justin. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here. Thank you so much for joining me. It's great to speak with you again. The last time we spoke was in Iceland, where we were both attending a sex research conference. And I believe we were having a beer at the Lebowski Bar, which is a pretty cool place. And this group of Icelandic girls started talking to us. And that's where I learned that in Iceland, because the population is so small, there's actually this

app that people will use to check to see whether or not they're related to someone before going out on a date in order to avoid accidental incest. And I thought that was so interesting because I've never heard about that anywhere else. So I'm curious, did you learn anything else interesting about sex while we were in Iceland?

That was certainly one of the interesting points. And maybe they were particularly concerned about me because I might look kind of Nordic. So there might have been a chance I could have been related to them somewhere along the line. The other things I learned were a lot from the Penis Museum, which I believe you attended as well, Justin. That was a lot of fun. That whole conference was a lot of fun. Who knew sex researchers could be such fun? Who knew? Well, I mean, I've known for a while because I've been going to these sex conferences for a few years, but

Anyway, so let's talk about incels, which is our main topic for the day. So as a starting point, let's define it. So when you say the word incel, what do you really mean? What's your definition?

Sure, because it's a really good question because you really need to know that type definition to know who you're talking about. So incels, as I would define them, are an online subculture of men who forge a strong sense of identity around a perceived inability to form sexual or romantic relationships.

And a significant minority of incels, roughly 10% based on some studies, engage in really extreme misogynistic online hostility or trolling or kind of what they would call shitposting online. And rare individual cases of incels have seen incels lash out at society in violent rage.

So the most notorious example there is Elliot Rodger, who wrote a 49 page manifesto talking about his resentment of Chad's and Stacy's, who are the sexually successful men and women who reject him in in some kind of lexicon. Now,

there is a lot of good reason to be concerned about incels. There's a lot of cross-cultural or cross-historical data to suggest that when you have a surplus population of unpartnered young men or sexless young men in any society, it leads to a lot of problems, a lot of

crime due to elevated status seeking behaviors among that population. And in the field of evolutionary psychology, we call that young male syndrome. So there's a lot of good reason to kind of worry about incels in terms of the online misogyny and the violence. But I do think that the violence is sometimes a little bit sensationalized and we judge the entire community by the actions of an extreme minority. So if we could put maybe the violence into context,

Overall, worldwide, the death count attributable to incel violence is roughly 60. And I don't mean to demean any of the victims at all of any incel attack, but compared to other terrorist threats, which incels sometimes get suggested that it's a new terrorist threat. If you compare that 60 death count, it's not as big as maybe other terrorist threats.

To put that into further context, 10 of those deaths alone can be attributed to one man called Alec Manassian. Alec Manassian is the guy who drove his van into a crowd of people in Toronto in 2014, and he killed 10 people with that. And

Right before he did what he did, he had a Facebook post talking about wanting to spark an incel rebellion and an uprising where they would overthrow the Chads and the Stacys. And he said, all hail Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger. The incel rebellion has begun. So very kind of frightening stuff. And this is always put front and center in any media story about incels.

Alec Manassian and Elliot Rodger are the kind of poster boys that are used to represent the incel community. But what's less often reported on the Alec Manassian case is the judge's verdict in that case. So the judge actually said the following. It said that Alec Manassian told lies deliberately to depict his killings anonymously.

as being connected to the incel movement and to get more media attention. He piggybacked on the incel movement to ratchet up his own notoriety and his story to the police about the attack being an incel rebellion was a lie.

So, you know, you don't often see that reported. So with other communities, we tend to try not to judge the entire community by the actions of the most extreme minority within that community. But I think we are largely doing that very thing within CELS.

I think you raise a lot of important points there. And this, as a social psychologist, has me thinking about our general human tendency to overestimate the frequency of rare events. So for example, if you think about something like plane crashes, people tend to think that they occur much more often than they actually do and that flying is a lot more dangerous than it really is because when a plane crash happens, it's a rare event, but it makes people

massive media coverage for several days. And so it's very easy to recall these instances of when it happens, but you don't hear about all of the tens of thousands of flights that happen every day without incident that are perfectly safe, right? So when you have something like incel and violence,

in combination, and that gets media attention, it sticks out in our brains more and it leads us to think that it might be more common than it really is, and that can lead people to paint the entire group through that same lens. So I think as with any online subculture community, there's a lot of diversity in it. Yes, it does seem that some of these individuals may be predisposed to violence. Some of them may be co-opting.

that name or group in order to gain more notoriety or attention, but they're not necessarily representative of the group as a whole, which is why it's important to talk about sort of the myth versus reality. And that's what we're going to be doing today. Now, to step back for just a second, so I appreciate the definition of incel that you shared. And incel is a term that stands for involuntarily celibate.

Right now, anyone of any gender, sexuality or age could be involuntarily celibate, meaning they'd like to have sex. But for one reason or another, they can't do it.

So, for example, maybe you're in a monogamous marriage or relationship and your partner has completely lost interest in sex. Or maybe you're very shy and socially anxious and find it hard to approach people. Likewise, I also have some friends with physical disabilities and some who are autistic who have experienced constant rejection. And in some cases, they've just sort of totally withdrawn from the dating market because it's too painful.

So wanting to have sex or relationships and being unable to do so is pretty common. But most of these folks don't identify as incels. They don't forge a sense of identity around this aspect of their lives. So I think that raises the question of who identifies as an incel and is really part of this subculture. And the stereotype that you hear in the media is that these are all college-age heterosexual white guys who hold a lot of right-wing views.

but that isn't necessarily what you find in your research. So who are the incels? Yeah, so we wanted to just get some demographic data on our study. And so our study consisted of 151 self-identified male incels. I could only find nine female incels for my study. So we tended to focus on the male cohort. So they're often described in the media as far-right, kind of white supremacist-adjacent incels.

But we actually found that there was 36% of our sample were incels of color. So that was surprising given what they reported on in the media. And we also asked about their political affiliation. Now, we just asked one question about political affiliation. So in our paper, I recommend that political affiliation

political beliefs are investigated a little bit further. But 39% of incels in our sample reported to be right-leaning in their political affiliation, 45% were left-leaning, and 17% were centrist. And I should just make the point that this is in a majority UK and US sample. So that actually 36% of incels being people of color is actually over-representative.

Other studies have found that when they've analyzed the language in incel forums, that just 3% of incel posts can be considered racist. Meanwhile, 30% of incel threads could be considered misogynistic. And self-hatred was by far the most common form of toxic language in the forums.

So the incel lexicon and kind of language and slang kind of terminology can be very derogatory and racialized. But the character of that type of racism is very different from what you might find on far right or white supremacist forums.

Thank you for sharing all of that. Now, I think there's this popular idea that incels are a new thing. And in the sense of being an online subculture that's organized around a shared inability to form sexual and romantic relationships,

Well, it is new in that sense because the internet hasn't been around all that long. But there have always been periods in history where you've had this sizable group of men who couldn't find partners. The surplus males, as you alluded to earlier. And there's this interesting article I read titled, Incels Could Become the Next Vikings. And it talks about how throughout history, the reason that Vikings were sent out on raids was because they couldn't find wives.

And so in earlier times where you had these groups of men that today we might label as incels, societies often tried to deal with this problem by sending them off to war or maybe putting them in a monastery. So they tried to give them some kind of purpose or meaning in their life to reduce the risk of them causing trouble at home. So can you speak to this idea about how incels have kind of always been around, but today's incels are kind of a different breed in some ways?

Yeah, so you bring up some very good points. And I'm sorry for any listeners that have a kind of a Viking fantasy. The way Vikings are kind of presented in modern programs and TV shows is very sexy. If you're anything like my girlfriend, she really likes the Vikings that are on the TV shows. And the Vikings on TV always have a sensitive side too, right? Yeah.

Right, yeah, maybe wouldn't be accurate and typical of what a real Viking would have been like. But like you described, they would have been, we used to have these kind of cultural institutions that would be an outlet for your surplus male population that just aren't really available to us anymore. There's even some evidence that talks about the Portuguese, when they went to kind of discover the new world or went sailing, that that was actually in response to having a surplus male population that they needed to

figure out something to put them doing. Otherwise, they'll get up to all sorts of trouble due to this young male syndrome. So yeah, unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, those devices aren't really available to us now. But what seems to be available for this modern cohort of incels is the internet. And the internet allows them to galvanize together for the first time, really, and find each other and kind of

empathize with each other, but it may also be kind of distracting incels who would otherwise be out in the world causing trouble. So although I don't mean to minimize the harm that the online misogyny and online kind of extreme language can cause, but it might actually be

The internet might be hijacking incels' status-seeking mechanisms, and if we think even beyond that, pornography. The evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman, she wrote a great article called Uncanny Vulvas that talks about how pornography might actually hijack men's mating-seeking behaviors. So they get a fake evolutionary cue that they're achieving evolutionary success

mating success by staying at home, masturbating to pornography. So that's a very interesting idea. But the idea that the internet could actually be pacifying what would otherwise be a more destabilizing group, because like we said, due to young male syndrome, we would actually expect incels to be more dangerous than they're currently representing.

So fascinating. And I'm thinking about this in light of so much that I've heard said about incels and how many people take the perspective that pornography and the anonymity of these kind of online forums is actually increasing propensity toward violence and misogyny and all of these other sorts of things. But as you mentioned, some argue that it might actually have kind of a pacifying effect in some ways.

Super interesting, different way of thinking about this. So let's talk more about how changes in the mating market are fueling the rise of the modern incel. Now, historically, men on average have had more wealth and power than women. And so women were generally marrying up, right, if you will. So they were pursuing partners with higher wealth and status than them.

But today, women are outpacing men in college degrees. And for full-time workers under 30, the gender wage gap is closing. And in fact, there are a growing number of areas in the US where young women are being paid the same or more than men of the same age. This is not to say that the wage gap doesn't exist. It certainly does. Just that it is getting smaller and in some areas it has closed or actually has shifted in the opposite direction.

And what's interesting is that as these changes are unfolding, we're seeing that women are still looking to marry up instead of marry down. And that's really distorting the mating market because you have this growing number of women who are raising their educational and economic standards for their male partners, talking about heterosexual folks here, but a shrinking number of men who can meet those standards. And so that actually makes it harder for everyone to find what they want.

And then if you factor in online dating, where you dramatically expand your pool of potential partners and you have the ability to be much more selective, that just amps up the frustration. So on the one hand, you know, there are things to celebrate here, like greater gender equality, or at least we're on the trajectory toward that when it comes to economics. But at the same time, there's that unintended side effect of a dating market where you've got this supply and demand issue. So what are your thoughts on this?

Yeah, absolutely. And that's where I think it's so interesting as a topic from my point of view, because the incel piece is just what I would say is a symptom of a wider mating crisis. And ultimately, you kind of summed it up there. It might be an uncomfortable truth for us that for the last number of decades or even longer, that women were maybe heterosexual women were settling with men that they didn't really want out of

strict monogamy norms or strict economic necessity. And now that both of those are kind of eroding, you see maybe a rise in women who would prefer to stay single or to mate up. So like you say, we have a kind of a culturally skewed sex ratio where there are fewer eligible men for women to pick from. And

In evolutionary psychology or in mating psychology, whenever you have a skewed sex ratio of whichever sex is in the scarcity, they actually call the shots in terms of the other's sociosexuality. So in any culture or city or university campus where there are fewer men, women actually shift their sociosexuality to being more unrestricted.

And there's a really cool study by Candice Blake that even was able to geolocate where there's more sexy selfies in these areas where there are fewer eligible men. So she frames it as that women increase the kind of mating competition for those few eligible men.

Now, there is some evidence that women are beginning to mate down, so to speak, in terms of these status hierarchies. There's some evidence that women are beginning to marry or mate with men who are less educated or less well-off than themselves. However, even the authors of that study talk about how

their findings don't speak to women's perceived difficulty in finding a mate. So I think some element of women beginning to mate down is intuitive. It makes sense that it's inevitable with women's rapid socioeconomic success. But there are all sorts of unintended consequences alongside that, one of which is

A recent study of 21,000 women in 27 European countries found that women who were higher educated or earned more than their partners were more likely to report all types of intimate partner violence. And that's due to kind of that precarious masculinity of when men perceive that they might be at risk of losing their partner, if their partner is spending their time at work around other high-status males.

Those men might pursue what's called a cost-inflicting mate retention strategy, whereby they try to lower their partner's self-esteem or kind of make it really costly for their partner to leave them. So that's a kind of an unintended consequence that we maybe need to grapple with.

Another idea to point towards is the role of capitalist kind of giants in driving this mating crisis. So Morgan Stanley, the investment bankers, released a report a couple of years ago called The Rise of the She Economy, which talked about how they forecast that by the year 2030, 45% of prime working age women between the ages of 25 and 44 will be single and childless.

And, you know, that's the highest in recorded history. It was 41% in 2018.

So you can kind of see how when we've shifted towards a brain-based economy that women are doing really well in, that these capitalist kind of giants can have an agenda to say, actually, it doesn't suit us for women to drop out of the workplace when they become mothers. We should actually focus on keeping them single and highlighting that that's the goal that they should strive towards.

Now, it doesn't strike me as entirely obvious that single and childless is the goal for most heterosexual women. But I'm kind of libertarian in my sensibilities that I kind of want more freedom for more people. But you can kind of see that this cultural drive for women to remain single is kind of happening.

Another data point to point towards is an article you shared actually, Justin. This is where I learned this piece of information, that as women have begun to start mating down, increases in female infidelity have increased in lockstep. So while rates of infidelity among men have remained pretty stable over time, they've increased by 40% among women in the last half century.

Now, even that 40%, if we take it that that's the case, women's infidelity is still only 70% at the rates of males. So men are still definitely more prone to committing infidelity. But I think it's an interesting kind of way to look at it as you free women up from relying on men, either economically or with strict monogamy norms.

there's some data to suggest that their rates of infidelity goes up as well, and that they might be more inclined to commit infidelity when they're with a partner of lower status. So there's all sorts of things going on here. But the mating crisis appears to hurt people

everyone except a small minority of men at the very top of this status hierarchy. So to give you some data on that, there's some data to suggest that the share of US men younger than 30 reporting having no sex within the last year rose from 8% in 2008 to 28% in 2018. But there's other data to suggest that

If you compare 2002, men overall had the same number of sex partners in 2013. But the top 20% of those men had a 25% increase in partners. And the top 5% of those men had a 38% increase, even more dramatic. So it's kind of reverting to this...

skew of almost like effective polygyny, whereby there's a few men who seem to be kind of monopolizing the attention of a lot of women, that minority that are at the top, given that they're the scarcity, they're reluctant to commit to long-term mating with these women because they're in the minority. They kind of call the shots in terms of the sociosexuality. And then you get a large surplus of men who are kind of disenfranchised.

And from an evolutionary point of view, that polygynous mating kind of pattern of one man with multiple women is actually more typical of our evolutionary history. 83% of human societies have been preferentially polygynous and actually monogamy developed as a cultural norm in response to this inequality on the mating market getting so extreme that

when men were able to stockpile resources with the advent of agriculture. So cultures that practiced monogamy as the main cultural norm flourished because they didn't have this surplus population of troublemaking, disenfranchised young men. So there's all sorts going on in the mating market that perhaps we need to think a little bit more deeply about because unfortunately it seems to be like an unintended consequence of the net good of women's liberation into the workplace.

all so fascinating. You know, as you say, you know, none of this is to say that women's liberation or equality, closing these gender gaps, none of that is a bad thing. That's all objectively a good thing, but it causes this reordering, restructuring of society in a lot of ways that I think we don't really necessarily know how to deal with. And it is really interesting that, you know, if you sort of look at men on this distribution, you've got

a lot of guys in the middle who are having a relatively modest amount of sex. You've got some at the far end who are having a lot of it with a lot of partners because they have more choice because they're essentially considered the most desirable or marriageable. And then you have this huge chunk at the bottom who can't find any partners at all. And I've conducted some representative surveys recently in the US, and I find that one in three

young men, you know, Generation Z guys report that they've never had partnered sex before. And, you know, that's a really staggeringly large number. And the number of young men who say they've never had partnered sex is much higher than the number of young women. It's about one in five for young women, one in three for young men. So you do see a pretty big gender difference there. And there are all kinds of implications of this that we can certainly

talk about, you know, part of it is that this has a lot of implications for mental health, which we'll get to a little bit later. You know, I find in my work that the people who aren't having partnered sex are the most stressed and they're the most anxious. And I think, you know, since we're talking about the mating market, before we kind of get into the mental health piece, you know, there are a lot of these men who want sexual or romantic partners.

whether or not they identify as incels, they're often given a lot of dating advice, like how to break through in the mating market. And oftentimes people will say, you just need to be yourself. You need to work out a little more. You need to let your personality shine through. What do you think? Is this kind of advice helpful or harmful to these guys who really struggle with getting any connections or matches at all in the mating market?

Yeah, I think a lot about this advice. And I do think there maybe could be a space for an ethical pickup artist kind of scene, because maybe the modern pickup artist scene that we have come to know has maybe descended into toxicity. I think we'd all maybe agree with that. But there does seem to be this vacuum of men who are keen to learn and to want to develop themselves. And I kind of think that that's the way forward for an individual. I know every individual will be different, but I think there's a way forward for an individual.

But my intuition is to try and develop yourself or to try and if you don't have the best looks, to try and compensate with some other aspect. So the example I use is if you find that you're a pretty short guy, you can compensate with a nice Irish accent. That's my kind of tactic for myself.

We take it for granted how easy it is to develop a winning personality. You know, if you're a socially anxious young man who gets a lot of rejection on the mating market, maybe it's often quite cruel rejection. It's not that easy to just develop a winning personality in response to that and develop a thick skin and get back up on the horse and try again. That's really quite tough. A lot of incels in particular report to have autistic traits.

So that's not easy for them to read the kind of the social dynamism of the mating market, which is a lot of implicit kind of cues. Yeah. And we also have the halo effect whereby we perceive attractive people as having more winning personalities. So all of that is kind of going on. So it's not that straightforward for me to think, oh, yeah, if you're not the best looking, you can just have a great personality. That's not that easy.

Regarding male development kind of overall, I think that's also become almost problematized, especially when you attach the goal of achieving romantic success to that self-development. So I give the example of Barack Obama a few years ago. He wrote in his autobiography that in college, he started reading different types of literature to impress different girls.

And he got lambasted in the media for a while about this as being manipulative and kind of fake and kind of trying to trick women. But I think, you know, as a lot of male listeners might empathize with,

The idea of female reward, sexual or romantic reward, as attached to your self-development is very intuitive and it's kind of been motivational for men ever and always. And even from an evolutionary point of view, in terms of Darwin's second idea of sexual selection,

It's a beautiful idea that the mind of one sex shapes the mind and body of the other. So female sexual selection and that reward system is pretty important. So yeah, there's a lot going on there. The advice is pretty, it's not sufficient in my point of view. And if we take the amount of incels that report to have physical or intellectual disabilities, which is quite high too, the idea of

to develop themselves just by going to the gym is very insufficient as well. And it's kind of demeaning to female tastes as well that, oh, if you just go to the gym, then women will want you. I think it's a little bit more than that. Yeah, you raised so many interesting points there. You know, one of them being

what is it that actually counts as deception in dating and mating, right? I had your advisor, Dr. David Buss, on the podcast previously, and we talked all about deception in the world of online dating and also in the broader animal kingdom. And so where does it cross a line to being deception if you go out of your way to try to make yourself more attractive to someone else? Because we all do this in some ways. So, you know, where is the line drawn? And I don't purport to know where that is.

But you also have me thinking about, you know, some of the people who are part of this community who may have physical or intellectual deficits or disabilities. And yeah, that advice to just go to the gym, work out, all these kinds of things, that's insulting and offensive, in addition to not being practical or feasible advice for some people. And also, I'm thinking about how I have some friends who are autistic and bisexual, and

technically they're incels in the mating market with women, right? They really struggle with reading appropriate social cues and making connections with women. And so many of them tend to just only have

sexual or romantic relationships with men because they seem to find that easier to understand in some ways, but then there's also men's greater willingness or openness to casual sex that creates more opportunities. So even though some of them might have a preference for, say, having romantic relationships with women, they tend to gravitate more toward men because sex is easier in that particular context. So there's all kinds of interesting intersections here with all of this stuff.

Absolutely, yeah. Now, most of what you'll hear in the popular media about incels is that these guys are dangerous. They're misogynists, they hate women, they feel like they're entitled to sex, they're prone to harassment and domestic violence, and just a threat to society more generally. And certainly, as we mentioned toward the top of the show, there have been some of these cases reported in the media that support this narrative.

But as I mentioned, we have this tendency to think that rare events are maybe much more common than they really are. So what should people really know about incels and violence? And are they really an inherently dangerous group or is it really just kind of more of a small minority within that group that is kind of taking up all the oxygen? Yeah.

Yeah, I think we do have a tendency to amplify the most extreme cases and sensationalize those in the media, like you say, those rare events. But I'm often asked about extremism and incels around the topic of extremism. And it's my opinion from looking at a lot of data and from our own studies, I think that extreme inceldom looks more like suicidality. So there's a lot of studies that show that

themes of suicide and depression and loneliness pervade the incel forums far more than violence or extremism on that front. So that's something we wanted to measure. But I'd just like to mention one other really good study that was like a content analysis of incel language on the forums. It's by a scholar called Dr. Sarah Daly, and it's called Goodbye My Friend Cells. And it analyzes suicidality content analysis.

on the incel forums, of which, unfortunately, there's plenty. So we wanted to investigate the kind of

some of the personality profile and certainly the levels of well-being among incels, which we predicted would be very low based on previous findings and based on data, like you said, about lacking mating success leads to poor mental health all around. So we found that incels scored significantly higher on depression, anxiety, and loneliness than our non-incels in our sample and significantly lower on satisfaction with life.

So to put that into context, to measure depression, we used the PHQ-9, which is used by the NHS, National Health Service in the UK, to clinically diagnose depression. So among incels, 73% of incels in our sample could be clinically diagnosed as severely or moderately severely depressed versus 33% of non-incels.

In terms of anxiety, we used the GAD-7, which is the instrument used to measure anxiety.

67% of incels could be clinically diagnosed as severely or moderately anxious versus 38% of non-incels. They also scored very high on loneliness. And another study by a scholar called Dr. Brandon Sparks found that incels lack social connections more broadly. So it's not just romantic options that they lack. They seem to lack friends more generally.

We also measured incels on a new personality construct called the tendency for interpersonal victimhood. The tendency for interpersonal victimhood kind of leads to an external locus of control. This idea that everything that happens in your life is because of something else outside of your own control. You can't affect change in your own life. And this makes sense for incels because many incels subscribe to what is called the black pill philosophy, which

Black pill philosophy is a derivative of the concept of the red pill from the movie The Matrix, which kind of suggests a willingness to see the world as it really is, as opposed to the blissful ignorance of the blue pill. The black pill for incels means their belief is that there is nothing and there was never nothing that they could do to improve their romantic prospects. So that ties in with that external locus of control philosophy.

The tendency for interpersonal victimhood is comprised of four different dimensions, which all are recognizable among incels. So the first is the need for recognition, like a preoccupation with having the legitimacy of your grievance acknowledged. And for incels,

What I've found in engaging with the community is that one of the most annoying things you can say to incels is that, oh, you're not so bad. You could go out and get a girlfriend. No problem. They really hate that. They actually prefer if you kind of level with them a bit or acknowledge their grievance and say, yeah, you really have a tough relationship.

So they're really craving this need for recognition that their situation really is as bad as they suggest. And they look for self-verifying information. So they go through life maybe seeking out information that proves their worldview to themselves. The second dimension of this personality construct is moral elitism. So the belief that an individual or their in-group behaves more morally than others.

And this is very recognizable among incels who might maybe sneer at the superficiality of the mating market. And they'll suggest that female mate preferences are very, they will demean them and say, oh, they want Chad, who's just a beautiful looking man, but not a good personality. And that they would have better tastes.

The third dimension is the lack of empathy, which is based around the idea that because of an individual's perceived pain, that they feel entitled to hurt others. So for incels, that would be, well, nobody cares about my pain, so why should I care about anyone else's pain? And

And the final element or dimension of the construct is rumination. So incels have a tendency to constantly play over their instances of perceived slights or rejection and really ruminate on those. So incels scored significantly higher than non-incels on all dimensions and overall of the tendency for interpersonal victimhood.

Another thing we found about incels that I forgot to mention in the demographic information I mentioned earlier is that we examined incels' socioeconomic status because

There's a lot of robust evidence from evolutionary psychology that women, heterosexual women, do indeed value socioeconomic status in a mate. So we wanted to investigate what was going on there. And we found that 50% of incels in our sample versus 27% of non-incels report to still live with a parent or carer. Now you might think, oh, well, incels are young men. Of course, they're still living with their parents or a carer. But

the average age for participants in our incel sample was 27. So one would expect that they have actually moved out by then. We also found that 17% of incels versus 9% of non-incels reported to be NEET. So that means not in education, employment or training. So that might be affecting their mating prospects as well.

And we also found that 36% of incels versus 20% of non-incels in our sample had a high school education or lower. So that might be all affecting their mental health and also their mating opportunities, and it might be bi-directional in terms of its effect.

Yeah, and that was actually going to be my next question for you was, do the negative mental health outcomes precede becoming an incel? Do they precede incel status? Or is it that when people become incels that that contributes to worsened mental health? And I think you're right that it's probably a bit of both. You know, as with most things in psychology, we're usually talking about bidirectional effects, but it certainly does seem to be the case based on your research that there

are some mental health issues here. Some of them may be pre-existing. Some of them may result from having or from being thwarted in terms of your ability to establish and maintain social, sexual, and romantic connections. And we know from the broader research in social psychology that the need to belong, the need to connect with other human beings is deeply

fundamental, it's powerful. And whenever we can't meet that need, it can have severe psychological and mental health consequences. And so I think that's a big part of what we're seeing here is just these individuals are not getting their belongingness needs met oftentimes in any ways, because as you mentioned, they often don't necessarily have the friendships either. So it's sometimes about something much broader than this.

Yeah, certainly. And when I started studying the topic, I kind of had the position of, well, how could anybody identify with this aspect of themselves? Why would they choose this over trying to engage with the mating market? But the more I actually became familiar, I could actually see what incels were getting out of their identity. They were getting a sense of fraternity, a victimhood identity, which can be kind of seductive at times.

You know, you feel a sense of entitlement there. They get a common enemy, a very black and white rubric through which to view the world. The common enemy is, you know, like women perhaps or, you know, feminism or whatever incels might suggest.

They get a rich lexicon of humorous kind of in-group terminology. And ultimately, what I think they get is an excuse to not participate in what they see as an anxiety-inducing mating market, which can be anxiety-inducing even for everyone, never mind a socially anxious incel. So there is one study that asked incels why they used the forums or what they got out of it. And the top reasons were to feel understood,

to feel less lonely and to provide them with a sense of belonging. But a little over half of the incels in that study reported that using the forums made them feel hopeless. So it's kind of a mixed bag that for some being on these forums might be positive for their mental well-being, and for some it might actually exacerbate the feelings of hopelessness.

But just to get back to that point about why would incels retreat from the mating market, you know, if you're not getting much success on the mating market, we've got kind of somewhat outdated genocides.

gender norms on the mating market as well, whereby still the expectation is for men to pay on the first date. That's kind of overwhelmingly the expectation still. So you can imagine being rejected a lot, not getting much success. You can actually imagine why incels might say, hey, I'm out. I'm actually going to not participate anymore, which is quite sad.

Yeah. And, you know, it also has me thinking about differences in the way that male and female virginity is also perceived and, you know, how for a man, you know, being a virgin is,

has always been a stigmatized status and the older you get while you're still a virgin, eventually that leads to ridicule and these other sorts of things. Like I'm thinking about the 40-year-old virgin movie. You know, it's a big running joke, running gag that this person hasn't been able to have sex. And so it can become humiliating at a certain point.

to never have had those experiences. And then in terms of the way that other people will treat you if they find out. Now, it's interesting more broadly how virginity has gone from being a celebrated and prized status in a lot of ways, especially for women, to actually being one that's

stigmatized for everyone to some degree, right? So if you look at people and what they say, they think the ideal number of partners or previous sexual experience they want a partner to have, you know, they want them to have had some experience, to not be...

totally inexperienced, but they don't want them to have too much experience either, right? So, you know, it's a whole weird thing where we want our partners to have just the right amount of sexual experience, but not too much that it makes us feel threatened and not so little that they're not going to be a competent sexual partner. So, you know, that's a whole interesting other discussion we could have.

There's like a sweet spot of sexual history. And that study was actually done by my former supervisor, Andrew Thomas at Swansea University. And together we're working on building on that study and doing a bigger cross-cultural one to see if there's cross-cultural differences in this preference for sexual history and attractiveness. But yeah, the point you make about kind of virginity being ridiculed now, there's

There's two things I'd mention is that even the term incel has kind of become just an insult now for any kind of almost creepy man, or it's just as seen as a put down. Men in particular, when they call somebody else an incel, they're trying to highlight their own sexual abundance. You know, they're kind of saying, who could ever identify as incel or not me anyway, because I'm having loads of sex, right? You know, it's kind of this

implication. And I do think that perhaps for incels or just people in generally, we overestimate how much sex everyone else is having. I think like we live in a very sex saturated world. You know, it's on TV. Every Netflix show has an amazing sex scene. Every billboard looks really, everyone looks attractive on Instagram. So you get this idea that the world is saturated in sex, but we probably overestimate that, I think.

We absolutely do. Now, I'm sure there are some people listening to this show who at some point, as we've been talking, have maybe thought that this sounds like we're being sympathetic to incels in some way. And who cares about them anyway, because they're just a bunch of sexually entitled online trolls.

And besides, what's the solution, right? Women shouldn't have to lower their standards to make things better for them because women have been making sacrifices for men for far too long as it is. So, I mean, I totally get all that and I'm sure you do too. So I'm curious what you say, you know, as an incel researcher, you probably get reactions like this. So what do you say to people who think we should just write off incels as a lost cause?

I suppose the first thing I try to highlight is that the misconceptions about the community more broadly, and we shouldn't judge them by the most extreme minority within the community. But I also try to highlight that this incel subculture is just a symptom of what I call that wider mating crisis that hurts both sexes, that hurts everyone. And the implications of having this kind of mating crisis hurt.

hurt everyone. It's not enough to just trivialize the problem as saying and dismiss it as, oh, they're just kind of online trolls and who cares about them anyway. I also think that there's kind of, we're almost running out of groups that it's okay to hate.

So people are maybe latching on to the incels as a socially sanctioned group that we can kind of punch down as much as we want. And I actually think we do that towards pedophiles or minor attracted people as well, whereby it's a free reign to criticize as much as possible and not try to understand and not even attempt to understand. So there's a similar kind of social function going on there. There's an appetite to demonize some group.

That's not a polite thing to do anymore, except for certain groups. But yeah, ultimately, it's a problem for the whole of society to grapple with, even if we think we're not affected by the mating crisis or the incel problem. We might be in ways that we're not acknowledging. Yeah, there always has to be a societal punching bag, right? I mean, human beings...

You know, we're not inherently good people, let's just say. You know, I used to tell my students when I was teaching social psychology courses that, you know, the real title for this course should be why people are dicks or assholes or whatever, you know, just because people do a lot of self-interested, not nice things. We have a lot of tendencies toward violence, toward aggression. It doesn't matter what social group you belong to, but you always have people who are

become these sort of targets of societal rage or anger. And I think you're right that this has changed a little bit in recent years in terms of which groups and which boundaries are acceptable to violate and so forth. But

You know, sometimes we make the problem worse when we go for these groups, even if they might be like a socially sanctioned group that everybody agrees to hate and circle around. You might be making the problem a lot worse than if you approached it in a somewhat different way. And I don't know the solution to that other than to just if people were just assholes less often. You know, I don't know how to deal with that.

Yeah, perhaps the online kind of world in which incels proliferate exacerbates this problem too. I believe the term is called nutpicking, which means you kind of select the most crazy sounding examples of your outgroup as representative of your outgroup. And then you're basically arguing against

straw man arguments of the other side. How useful that is, is not that clear. But we should maybe try and get to groups with the reality of the community rather than just the most extreme. Yeah, this has me thinking all about my graduate school training in social identity theory and how, you know, we all have this drive to perceive our group memberships, our identities as positively distinct from those of other groups. And that's part of what fuels a lot of the divisions that

have and always will exist in our society. And, you know, there have been a lot of social psychologists who have tried to develop interventions to try and get people to find common ground so that we can solve certain social problems. It's just unfortunately much harder than you might think that it is.

I actually, I'm engaging with a qualitative interviews with individual incels men as well now. I've got a series of interviews recorded and one individual said something very salient at the end of our interview. I asked him, what would it mean to no longer be incel? And he said, to no longer be incel would be to no longer be an outcast.

He didn't even link it to sex or relationships or anything like that. It was just this disenfranchisement more broadly, disconnected from society. And there's an African proverb that talks about that a young man who doesn't feel the warmth of a village will burn it down just to feel its warmth. If he feels cut out, will lash out at society just to get acknowledgement. And that might be what's happening in the case of the most extreme incels. Yeah, I think there's so much truth to that.

Thank you so much for this fascinating conversation, William. I mean, I could talk about this for days because there are so many fascinating complexities here, but it was a pleasure to speak with you. Can you please tell my listeners where they can go to learn more about you and your work?

Sure. So our first paper from this piece of research, which was for my master's dissertation, and that's currently in press at the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science. My co-authors and I are working on the second paper right now, which hopefully will find a home in a journal shortly. And that's all about incel mating psychology. To keep up with my work, I'm

Like every other academic, I spend far too much time on Twitter. And my handle is at Costello William. You'll find me there. I spend too much time there. Thanks for having me, Justin. You're very welcome. And yeah, I sometimes spend a little too much time on social media myself.

Thank you for listening. To keep up with new episodes of this podcast, visit my website, sexandpsychology at sexandpsychology.com or subscribe on your favorite platform where I hope you'll take a moment to rate and review the show. If you listen on Apple Podcasts, please consider becoming a Sex and Psychology Premium subscriber to enjoy ad-free listening for just $3.99 a month.

You can also follow me on social media for daily sex research updates. I'm on Blue Sky and X at Justin Laymiller and Instagram at Justin J. Laymiller. Also, be sure to check out my book, Tell Me What You Want. Thanks again for listening. Until next time.