TRIGGERnometry - The Truth About Incels

00:00:00.000 We wanted to kind of investigate the political attitudes a little bit more.

00:00:04.740 And 39% said they were right-leaning.

00:00:07.720 17% said they were centrist.

00:00:10.020 And 45% said they were, roughly 45% said they were left-leaning.

00:00:14.720 So not what we expected to find, given what the media kind of reports.

00:00:18.880 But if you think about it, with incel rhetoric being quite based around redistribution of sexual access,

00:00:26.580 it kind of maybe makes sense from an extreme left-wing point of view.

00:00:30.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:57.100 I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:58.200 I'm Constantine Kissen.

00:00:59.440 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:01:05.740 Our brilliant guest today is a PhD researcher in the field of evolutionary psychology.

00:01:10.340 William Costello, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:12.020 Thanks for having me on.

00:01:12.960 Happy to be here.

00:01:13.660 It's really good to have you on, man.

00:01:15.300 Before we get into the conversation, we really wanted to talk to you specifically about incels

00:01:19.820 because that's something we covered recently and you got in touch with us and you will

00:01:23.660 hear some data and facts and research on it.

00:01:26.420 So we thought it would be really good to get you on to talk about it more.

00:01:29.440 Before we do, though, tell everybody a little bit about your background, how are you, where you are, what's been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?

00:01:36.760 Sure. So I moved from Ireland to England for my undergraduate degree 11 years ago.

00:01:42.780 Just last year, I graduated from Brunel University, London, with a master's in psychology, culture and evolution.

00:01:50.420 My research dissertation topic was incel psychology.

00:01:55.340 And my colleague and co-author, she always jokes to me that people say that research is me-search.

00:02:01.180 So I have no comment on that from my side of things.

00:02:04.560 But I'm just about to move to Austin, Texas to join the David Buss Evolutionary Psychology Lab there as a PhD student and researcher.

00:02:13.440 And yeah, so that's kind of me and my journey in a nutshell.

00:02:17.320 And it's good to see you've lost the action in 11 years as well.

00:02:20.680 Yeah, and pick up the bromey one.

00:02:22.160 And David Buss, of course, being the founder of basically the creator of the field of evolutionary psychology.

00:02:26.860 So that's an amazing move for you. Congrats.

00:02:29.080 But let's talk about what you wanted to talk to us about, because we've had some guests on and we touched on the subject of incels.

00:02:36.420 But you've done a lot of very interesting research into it.

00:02:39.020 So if anyone coming to this issue for the first time doesn't know anything about it, who are incels, how do you define them, etc.

00:02:45.740 Right. So incels are a kind of an online subculture community of men who form a strong

00:02:52.200 sense of their identity around what they perceive as their inability to form sexual or romantic

00:02:57.540 relationships. They believe in something called the black pill. Many incels believe in something

00:03:03.400 called the black pill, which means in their case that there is simply nothing they can do to

00:03:08.400 improve their romantic prospects and that it's over for them in terms of competing on the mating

00:03:13.720 market. A significant minority of incels engage in what we call misogynistic online hostility.

00:03:21.000 But one study found that just 10% of incels are responsible for the vast majority of the

00:03:28.160 extreme hateful content online. So like any other group, it's kind of tends to be the fringe

00:03:34.140 minorities within that community that shout the loudest and maybe get used as emblematic of that

00:03:39.960 community in rarer instances still incels have lashed out in violent rage the most famous case

00:03:47.340 is Elliot Rodger who in Ilsa Vista in California in 2014 he wrote a 49-page manifesto talking about 0.55

00:03:57.240 how he wanted to have a day of retribution where he would kill chads who are the sexually 0.94

00:04:02.560 successful men mean you mate right yeah and and uh and so stacy's are the the sexually 0.96

00:04:11.780 successful women that reject him so he's really like kind of resentful and um how prototypical

00:04:17.900 he is of uh typical of an incel uh is not that clear from a psychological point of view which

00:04:24.240 is what i wanted to kind of study but always in the media you'll see two cases always brought up

00:04:30.280 the Elliot Rodger case and the Alec Manazian case. Alec Manazian is the guy in Toronto who

00:04:36.000 drove his van into a crowd of people and killed 10 in that attack. And he's just actually the

00:04:41.700 other day been sentenced to 25 years to life. So worldwide, the incel death count attributable

00:04:48.640 to incels is about 50 to 60. Alec Manazian alone can account for 10 of those. And he's

00:04:55.920 always reported on in the media

00:04:57.860 as the typical kind of incel.

00:05:00.240 But what's not often reported on

00:05:02.540 is the judge's verdict last year came out

00:05:05.140 where the judge, if you look into the report,

00:05:07.960 said that the Alec Manais,

00:05:09.360 he clearly piggybacked on the incel movement

00:05:11.980 to gain notoriety

00:05:13.240 and to get more kind of infamy

00:05:15.220 associated with his act of violence.

00:05:17.880 And that's kind of,

00:05:19.060 I have a bit of an issue

00:05:20.080 with the way the media report on the incel problem

00:05:22.780 because by giving such a notoriety

00:05:25.500 to these attackers, it could potentially inspire future spree killers.

00:05:30.700 You know, I mean, if you were seeking to gain notoriety,

00:05:35.380 you can get your YouTube videos splashed all over the news, 1.00

00:05:38.780 and that goes directly against kind of media guidelines 1.00

00:05:41.840 from anti-terrorism kind of organizations and male supremacists. 1.00

00:05:45.660 Particularly when you're dealing with people who are low status,

00:05:48.640 who are seeking status,

00:05:49.760 that would seem to be a very dangerous thing to be doing.

00:05:52.160 Absolutely, yeah.

00:05:53.020 So it's kind of, it's a dangerous game to play.

00:05:55.500 But yeah, beyond that, I just think it's very unfair to the wider kind of incel community to kind of hold up the most extreme actions of an extreme minority within that community as representative.

00:06:10.000 We tend to rail against that attitude about other groups.

00:06:13.580 For example, it's harmful to stereotype Muslims as terrorists based on the actions of an extreme minority.

00:06:21.440 So those figures maybe might come as surprising to some people

00:06:25.280 who kind of think, well, the vast majority of incels are misogynistic

00:06:29.100 and potentially violent.

00:06:31.320 William, it sounds like you've got a great deal of sympathy for these people,

00:06:34.440 or these blokes, I should say.

00:06:36.180 Well, yeah, I mean, my sexual and romantic relationships in my life

00:06:40.480 have been some of the most enriching experiences available to people. 0.94

00:06:44.240 So for that to come, for it to happen that incels form their identity 0.94

00:06:50.220 to have such psychological pain with the prospect of trying to form romantic relationships that it 0.94

00:06:55.640 forms their identity, I imagine that must be a significant kind of pain. And, you know, I just

00:07:00.300 think it's a poorly understood topic and we could do better to understand better the problems incels

00:07:06.720 face and represent in society. And that's why I set out to study them. And maybe I'm being

00:07:14.760 judgmental here how much of this is just a load of blokes just being incredibly self-pitying

00:07:20.680 and going poor me poor me poor me because look there's all been times in our lives where we've

00:07:25.580 struggled to get a date we've struggled to get a girlfriend is it really the answer to go online

00:07:31.020 and then feel sorry for yourself or am I being incredibly unsympathetic uh right no you're not

00:07:36.260 wrong and you know we've it's a to be sexually successful you have to kind of go through a lot

00:07:41.060 of rejection right and it may be the case that incels are just very high on rejection sensitivity

00:07:46.140 and uh but it could be that just participating in the mating market causes them a lot more anxiety

00:07:51.500 than the typical person but i think you might be familiar that uh victimhood is in vogue these days

00:07:57.180 yeah so particularly online so i think incels and disenfranchised young men rather than competing

00:08:03.560 in an anxiety inducing mating market they said i'll have a piece of that victimhood pie and uh

00:08:09.180 form my identity, largely online, around this identity.

00:08:13.880 And of course, you talk about this in some of your research, that there are certain criteria

00:08:18.060 for, and a lot of studies have been done to show what percentage of incels do this and

00:08:23.600 that, and the psychological traits that predispose people.

00:08:26.520 So if we talk about the mainstream media coverage, I want to just come back to that for a second.

00:08:31.160 One of the points you made is that in your research, for example, so the basic mainstream

00:08:35.800 narrative is these are far-right, white nationalist, you know, chauvinistic, sexist, and of course

00:08:42.960 there are some who are. But actually some of the research you've done, you found that these are

00:08:47.860 disproportionately ethnic minority people actually, for example, right? And also I think you found

00:08:53.740 that some of the stereotypes are true, like half of incels live with their parents. So the basement

00:08:58.080 dwelling stereotype, you know, is fairly accurate. What are some of the other statistics that you 0.99

00:09:03.280 can share with us about these groups? Sure, yeah, and that was a significant finding that we had

00:09:07.980 around the kind of, we wanted to confirm or dispel this idea that they're far-right white

00:09:13.480 supremacist movements. So yeah, 36% of our sample of 151 male incels were of colour, people of colour,

00:09:23.220 and it was a largely US and UK sample, so that is disproportionate. Fewer incels were white

00:09:28.880 than we would expect by chance.

00:09:32.120 Sorry to interrupt, William.

00:09:34.020 By colour, let's break it down.

00:09:35.880 Do they come predominantly from one type of background?

00:09:38.700 Is it like Black Caribbean, Black African, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, etc.?

00:09:42.920 So there was, as I recall, a little disproportionately more on South Asian in our sample.

00:09:50.000 But for this statistic, I kind of clumped all the people of colour together versus white 0.97

00:09:54.880 because the majority were white, given our sample was US and UK.

00:09:58.880 but nothing overwhelming of one particular minority.

00:10:03.460 But incels are quite,

00:10:06.020 the idea that they might be white supremacist and far right

00:10:09.800 always struck me as a little bit odd

00:10:11.600 because incels are very concerned online

00:10:13.700 with what they see as the racism of the mating market.

00:10:16.780 So they think that dating is quite racist

00:10:19.660 and there is perhaps some statistics that bear that true.

00:10:22.880 So it seems a very unusual thing 0.51

00:10:25.080 for a bunch of white supremacists

00:10:26.920 to be concerned about racism on the dating market, right?

00:10:30.200 So I didn't know that, William.

00:10:32.820 Can we just double-click on that quickly before?

00:10:35.040 I want to hear all the data as well.

00:10:37.160 When you say they're concerned about racism, what do you mean?

00:10:41.120 So they're highlighting what they see as the unfairness

00:10:44.080 of the dating market in every sort of way they can see.

00:10:48.060 But one of the ways is that they say, oh, it's quite racist.

00:10:51.460 People's dating preferences are somewhat racist.

00:10:54.420 So the idea that some races do particularly better in dating than others, it seems a strange thing.

00:11:02.160 If you were a white supremacist, you would not have an issue with that.

00:11:05.900 But they do. They're concerned about that.

00:11:07.580 I hadn't heard that. Anyway, please carry on.

00:11:09.900 So for the levels of well-being that we want to investigate,

00:11:13.420 there's many reasons to think that incels commonly report that they struggle with their well-being

00:11:17.540 and have mental health issues.

00:11:20.240 So we used the NHS instruments, the PHQ-9 to measure depression and the GAD-7 to measure anxiety.

00:11:29.420 And 73% of incels in our sample versus 33% of non-incels could be clinically diagnosed as having severe or moderately severe depression.

00:11:40.960 67% of incels could have severe or moderate anxiety based on NHS guidelines versus 38% of non-incels.

00:11:49.440 and 82% of incels in our sample said they had strongly considered suicide.

00:11:55.700 We wanted to kind of investigate the political attitudes a little bit more

00:11:59.520 and it wasn't the main finding of our study

00:12:02.120 but we did ask one question about political attitudes

00:12:04.860 and 39% said they were right-leaning,

00:12:08.700 17% said they were centrist

00:12:10.520 and roughly 45% said they were left-leaning.

00:12:15.660 So not what we expected to find

00:12:18.080 given what the media kind of reports but if you think about it with incel rhetoric being quite

00:12:23.360 based around redistribution of sexual access it kind of maybe makes sense from an extreme left

00:12:29.920 wing point of view but you brought up the good point about the the kind of the stereotype of 0.97

00:12:34.880 incels still living at home and one might be tempted to think okay 50 percent of incels still

00:12:40.180 living at home but perhaps they're quite young the typical incel is a young male right however the

00:12:46.360 mean the average age for incels in my sample was 27 so you would expect you wouldn't perhaps expect

00:12:55.060 that 27 year olds are still living at home now it's become a lot more difficult to get on the

00:12:59.740 housing market particularly if you don't have a partner you actually kind of need a dual earning

00:13:04.800 household to get a mortgage pretty much these days so it's a double double whammy for incels

00:13:09.160 to get circularly punished because being neat not engaged in education employment or training

00:13:14.580 So 17% of incels versus 9% of non-incels are considered neat.

00:13:19.860 And that would have a real impact on their dating prospects.

00:13:23.560 Because particularly for men, socioeconomic status is a very important factor.

00:13:29.180 What it sounds like when you're describing these men,

00:13:31.380 and I'm actually getting more and more sympathy the more that we go through this interview,

00:13:34.980 they just sound like blokes who've fallen through the cracks in society.

00:13:38.060 Right, yeah. It's just disenfranchised young men.

00:13:40.960 And unfortunately, historically, disenfranchised, sexless, unpartnered young men, a surplus of that demographic of people in a society, has historically been very dangerous.

00:13:52.420 In the evolutionary psychology literature, we call that young male syndrome.

00:13:56.160 And they're typically the most prone to crime because they have elevated risk-taking and status-striving behaviors.

00:14:03.500 So I recently heard it described as that they have like a need for chaos,

00:14:07.700 that they'd rather just tip the whole monopoly board of society over

00:14:11.040 rather than participate in it because they feel we don't have a stake in this society

00:14:15.600 and nothing gives a young man a stake in society more so than a partner.

00:14:21.100 And on that point, first of all, incredibly worrying that China has a large number of men who can't get married, basically. 1.00

00:14:31.720 But also, the question I wanted to ask you is,

00:14:35.200 is it a case of we've got more people in that position than we've ever had?

00:14:40.020 Or is it a case where we now have technology that allows people

00:14:43.820 who otherwise would have been sitting in their mother's basement

00:14:47.000 and playing computer games, well, now they have a community.

00:14:50.180 We all now have a community.

00:14:52.320 We're all part of some community and we can go online

00:14:54.980 and we can talk to other people who are part of that community

00:14:58.360 and we become embedded.

00:15:01.300 And I know one of the concerns,

00:15:02.480 particularly with incels,

00:15:03.380 is being on an incel forum,

00:15:06.640 they don't want you to get better, right?

00:15:08.880 The moment you start actually getting dates

00:15:11.100 and, you know, whatever,

00:15:12.440 you become ostracized, right?

00:15:14.880 So is it a case that we've got more people

00:15:17.080 in this position

00:15:17.760 or is it a case that the tools of modern communication

00:15:21.060 have allowed people to get together

00:15:22.720 and be like, we're all incels together?

00:15:25.100 Right, so yeah,

00:15:25.860 touched on some very, very key points there.

00:15:27.740 So historically, throughout our evolutionary history, we always have had a greater variability of male reproductive success.

00:15:35.300 So a lot of men throughout our evolutionary history haven't got to reproduce.

00:15:39.660 So we've always had an incel problem.

00:15:42.480 However, we had institutions to kind of deal with this kind of surplus population.

00:15:46.980 You had monasteries.

00:15:48.580 You had even, unfortunately, maybe an unpalatable idea is the idea of war

00:15:53.460 and sending young men off on raids with the promise

00:15:56.620 that they will be able to get a wife that way.

00:15:58.840 So Mary Harrington, who I understand you've had on the show,

00:16:01.720 she wrote a really interesting article on incels as the new Vikings.

00:16:06.200 So Vikings, historically, would have been prototypical incels,

00:16:11.240 unpartnered young men who could be sent raiding in war.

00:16:14.920 So those kind of cultural institutions aren't really available.

00:16:18.760 Perhaps I think it's clear that's a good thing,

00:16:21.520 but it does leave us with this surplus population.

00:16:25.100 I think you're right that the online worlds

00:16:26.920 have given all sorts of communities

00:16:29.500 a chance to kind of galvanize around together.

00:16:32.120 And that might make this particular group 1.00

00:16:34.020 of incels unique in history 1.00

00:16:37.000 to be the first to consciously grapple

00:16:39.000 with the fact that they may be to some extent

00:16:41.360 an evolutionary dead end directly,

00:16:44.380 which is, you know, might really mess with someone's psyche.

00:16:48.120 there's also the kind of modern features of the modern mating market that are evolutionarily

00:16:54.160 mismatched with our ancestral mating market that maybe exacerbate problems there as well so if you

00:16:59.940 think about it in our ancestral environment you would have encountered perhaps a couple of dozen

00:17:05.300 potential mates in a lifetime so persistent sexual rejection would have been perceived as

00:17:10.180 catastrophic you know if you if that got a up and running you potentially oh i'm a dead end here

00:17:15.780 whereas that's not quite the case now

00:17:18.420 but the rejection still hurts the same

00:17:20.280 and someone in the modern dating market

00:17:22.420 with dating apps, big cities, transport around

00:17:25.780 could encounter more rejection in one day

00:17:28.320 than would be possible in a lifetime

00:17:29.920 in our ancestral environment

00:17:31.500 so for the psyche still remains the same

00:17:34.080 so that may compound any negative effects on the well-being

00:17:37.640 a couple of other evolutionary novel features

00:17:40.720 of the modern mating market

00:17:41.880 are the online way

00:17:44.300 it's a ubiquitous way to meet your partner now.

00:17:46.720 I think 70% plus people since 2017 have met their partner online.

00:17:52.280 And that means that the competition you're up against

00:17:55.620 is everybody in the wider vicinity,

00:17:58.780 not just who's in your neighboring tribe.

00:18:01.220 It's just the whole world is against you.

00:18:04.340 And the way that works negatively is that for an incel,

00:18:07.880 a woman of maybe similar, what we would say, 0.99

00:18:09.900 similar mate value,

00:18:10.940 but she might be able to to meet a guy of higher mate value online and he will be willing to to

00:18:18.660 have a sexual experience with her maybe once or twice but not commit to long term but she gets

00:18:25.120 the idea that's my level and that's what I want now I'm going to keep chasing that and perhaps

00:18:30.160 you'd say well why shouldn't she you know but it may also be an uncomfortable truth that we have

00:18:35.880 to wrestle with that for most of our recent history women had been settling with guys that

00:18:40.640 they really weren't that keen on but just out of strict monogamy norms and strict economic

00:18:46.460 necessity they kind of had to now that women are beginning to outpace men in education certainly

00:18:52.620 and up until the age of 30 economically they're kind of there's a mismatch of highly educated

00:19:00.220 and selective women versus economically unattractive men because the the female

00:19:05.360 mate preference for a similarly high earning or higher earning partner still remains so those 0.92

00:19:13.040 minority of men at the top so there is a kind of some truth to this cliche of a minority of men

00:19:18.140 are kind of monopolizing the attention uh that's born through in a lot of studies that we see and

00:19:23.680 in a lot of um kind of facts and figures that illustrate that point there is some truth to that

00:19:28.620 and when you have a minority in any sex ratio they call the shots in terms of uh sexual behavior

00:19:35.080 So if there's only a minority of women in a society, 1.00

00:19:40.620 the men are more keen to commit long-term.

00:19:43.840 Whereas if you have only a minority of eligible men,

00:19:47.120 then they call the shots and they're reluctant to commit.

00:19:50.300 And the sociosexuality of the other sex

00:19:53.060 has to mirror whichever is in the minority.

00:19:55.620 It's a fascinating way to look at it,

00:19:57.860 like something so fundamental as sex ratios.

00:20:00.760 And there was even one really cool study

00:20:03.000 that these researchers called Rob Brooks and Candace Blake,

00:20:07.080 they were able to predict geographic areas

00:20:09.580 of high online incel activity based on three variables.

00:20:13.480 Number one, high income inequality overall.

00:20:16.600 Number two, small gender pay gaps. 0.99

00:20:18.900 So women earning nearly as much or more than men.

00:20:22.200 And number three, male biased sex ratios.

00:20:25.300 So fewer single women. 1.00

00:20:26.520 So all of those together could predict geographic areas

00:20:29.680 of incels around the country.

00:20:31.360 That was amazing.

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00:22:57.080 for one additional month for free. And what about the fact that if you take, if you look at Love

00:23:04.620 Island, which I despise and I think is a symbol of our society slowly crumbling and falling into

00:23:09.960 the sea. But if you look at what they think is masculine beauty, it's a very specific type of

00:23:18.380 guy buff to within an inch of his life, a certain height, a certain set of features. Now this is

00:23:23.860 replicated on Instagram and all the way through our media. Is there any wonder that some lads just

00:23:30.140 look at these blokes and go, well, this is what it means to be a good looking bloke. I'm never

00:23:34.300 going to achieve that. So what's the point in taking part? Well, yeah, that's exactly it. And

00:23:38.720 they might just say it's so hurtful to actually try and participate in this. How has it come to

00:23:45.180 be that a significant portion of our young male population would prefer the victimhood identity

00:23:51.380 of inceldom than actually participate in mating competition. You know, they must be getting

00:23:56.820 something out of this identity. So they do, they get fraternity, they get a common enemy,

00:24:01.580 a simple way to kind of view the world. And one idea from Diana Fleischman, who I believe you had

00:24:07.580 on the show as well, she put forward the idea that because of pornography, these men who are

00:24:12.880 staying at home and not participating in the mating market, they're getting what is called

00:24:17.440 counterfeit fitness cues from pornography that tells them you're being a reproductive great

00:24:22.680 success because you're having the sexual stimuli, you're ejaculating, and those two click together

00:24:28.960 and they think there's no point in going out seeking status. Yeah, you're killing it to stay 0.90

00:24:33.240 at home seeking status at home. I think it was Jordan Peterson who said this, that what we're

00:24:37.220 feeding our young men with video games and pornography is the worst of both of us because

00:24:41.900 when you play video games you feel that you're becoming successful that you're improving

00:24:45.680 that you're hitting all these stats and targets right and I remember I had the experience over

00:24:50.540 lockdown where I was playing championship manager whatever football manager and I and I won the FA

00:24:55.260 cup and then I signed the contract for being on 80 grand a week and I'm like yes and I look around

00:24:59.620 at my little flat and I went what the fuck am I doing right yeah that's a really good analogy 0.52

00:25:04.060 because I was addicted to football manager as well so I know and it's such a futile sense of 0.94

00:25:09.000 seeking status because you can't even share it with your friends um but yeah i wouldn't actually

00:25:13.180 not with women that's not going to help right yeah it's not sexy they're very they're not very 0.99

00:25:17.560 open-minded when it comes to your success right yeah but i wouldn't be so hasty to kind of throw

00:25:22.880 the baby out with the bathwater and say it's all negative that the status seeking is kind of uh

00:25:28.040 kind of zeroed in on online worlds because that might actually be what's stopping incels being

00:25:34.020 more of a violent, disruptive process in society.

00:25:37.140 Because if they weren't seeking status in these online worlds,

00:25:40.300 they would potentially, like all the other evidence for young male syndrome,

00:25:44.180 be doing it out in the world.

00:25:46.220 So, you know, while the online hostility

00:25:48.860 and the kind of disenfranchisement of young men in society,

00:25:54.620 it might be a problem on one hand.

00:25:56.640 It may present a bigger problem if you get rid of it.

00:26:00.680 What about the uncharitable way of looking at this,

00:26:03.040 which is to look at these men and go, right,

00:26:06.040 so they join these communities because they want fraternity

00:26:08.580 and all the other reasons you're explaining,

00:26:10.020 which all make perfect sense to me.

00:26:12.840 And then me thinking, well, you've just picked the easy route here, mate.

00:26:17.060 Instead of working on yourself, instead of going out and going,

00:26:20.540 you know, this is what I want to do with my life,

00:26:22.820 and working really hard and maybe having to work two jobs

00:26:25.840 or whatever it may be, you're just sat in your room

00:26:28.300 feeling sorry for yourself and your mates who you've never met before.

00:26:33.040 Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the idea of getting the girl has been motivational for men

00:26:39.860 to improve themselves and seek status a lot. There's an interesting paper called The Evolution

00:26:44.980 of the Manosphere that talks about the pickup artist to incel pipeline. So incels actually

00:26:51.140 came about because they originally tried pickup artist camps or routines, didn't really work.

00:26:57.360 and they said, oh, I've tried to gamify this system.

00:27:01.220 It didn't work.

00:27:01.920 I must be incel.

00:27:03.420 And they just hunkered down into the victimhood

00:27:06.000 of that identity then.

00:27:07.480 But there's a funny thing that happens

00:27:09.040 when you acknowledge or when you explicitly attach

00:27:12.140 the goal of achieving getting a girlfriend

00:27:14.920 to any form of male self-development.

00:27:17.540 Do you remember a couple of years ago,

00:27:19.080 Barack Obama, when he wrote his autobiography

00:27:21.340 and he wrote a couple of chapters on it about in college,

00:27:24.560 he started reading certain books to impress girls.

00:27:27.360 And I think that resonates with a lot of men of, you know, you'd try any trick to kind of,

00:27:32.360 it's a real motivator to go and improve yourself.

00:27:35.040 But Barack Obama was like lambasted in the media for, oh, how misogynistic, you know,

00:27:40.180 he's doing all these manipulative tactics to try and get particular girls.

00:27:44.640 Like he was saying, I read this Marxist literature to impress one girl,

00:27:48.440 read this other literature to impress another one.

00:27:50.860 And, you know, that seems pretty innocuous to me.

00:27:53.140 And it seems typical of male behavior.

00:27:54.420 I mean, women would never manipulate men together, would they? 1.00

00:27:56.540 Right.

00:27:57.120 They'd never put on makeup or anything like that.

00:27:59.300 Right.

00:27:59.860 Yeah, that wouldn't happen.

00:28:01.380 But look, before I want to talk about some of the pathways out because I think it's important.

00:28:07.700 And I know that there'll be people who come across this video on the Internet who are in sales.

00:28:12.820 And so I want to talk about some of the potential pathways to success out of it, because I think this is the thing that I think people don't realize is there's a difference between men and women.

00:28:22.480 and one of the differences between men and women

00:28:24.540 is that women can victim their way out of problems sometimes. 1.00

00:28:30.920 That's not going to work for men. 0.72

00:28:32.700 You're not going to victim yourself out. 0.95

00:28:34.580 No one's going to give you shit for being a victim when you're a guy. 0.99

00:28:38.240 Fair, unfair, right, wrong, I don't care. 0.99

00:28:41.020 That's how it is, right?

00:28:42.680 You're going to have to work, dig your way out of it yourself.

00:28:45.440 So I want to talk about that.

00:28:47.060 But before that, how does one become an incel?

00:28:49.840 Is it something that you think is a genetic predisposition?

00:28:53.900 Is it part of you get mentally unwell?

00:28:56.660 You may be a bit depressed.

00:28:57.780 Maybe this happens, that happens.

00:28:59.520 Like, what's the pathway?

00:29:01.220 Yeah, so I'd be very reluctant to kind of pathologize inceldom

00:29:04.660 as like any sort of genetic thing.

00:29:08.440 You know, just for any amount of reasons,

00:29:10.980 someone could have enough difficulty in the dating arena

00:29:13.760 and enough psychological problems

00:29:15.980 that it causes them enough psychological distress

00:29:18.000 that this becomes their identity.

00:29:19.360 I think that's all there is to it.

00:29:20.780 It's not like, it's not a disease or anything like that.

00:29:24.240 I wasn't saying that, but people are genetically predisposed

00:29:26.540 to all sorts of things, good and bad, right?

00:29:28.760 Certainly, yeah.

00:29:29.500 But I'd be very surprised if there was one,

00:29:31.940 maybe some kind of genetic disposition for low mating effort

00:29:34.800 and more reluctance to try in the mating arena.

00:29:38.700 But I think it's more a kind of like a subculture phenomenon

00:29:41.440 that plays into kind of psychological issues

00:29:46.240 that people are experiencing.

00:29:48.000 So one thing we found that incels in our sample scored very high on a new personality construct

00:29:52.600 called the tendency for interpersonal victimhood.

00:29:55.160 And when I describe this tendency, you might recognize it in a lot of groups, actually,

00:29:58.660 and you might think, oh, we should test it on this other group.

00:30:01.560 So it's comprised of four different sub-dimensions.

00:30:04.820 The need for recognition, which is a preoccupation with having the legitimacy of your grievance acknowledged.

00:30:10.580 So the worst thing you can say to an incel is, you know what, you're not actually that bad.

00:30:14.540 You could actually pick yourself up by your bootstraps and go out.

00:30:16.900 they really hate that 0.99

00:30:18.080 that's what I'm about to fucking say 0.99

00:30:19.760 and that's what Jordan Peterson says 0.99

00:30:22.260 anytime he spoke about incels

00:30:24.380 what you might expect

00:30:27.000 or what some media might expect Jordan Peterson

00:30:28.980 to say about them, it was way off

00:30:30.880 he said, I won't do a Jordan Peterson

00:30:33.060 impression, but he said

00:30:34.860 basically, oh incels

00:30:36.560 if you say that all women

00:30:38.720 don't want you, then they're right 1.00

00:30:40.520 they're not wrong, all the women 0.51

00:30:42.980 in the world that don't want you can't

00:30:44.880 be wrong, you need to, and like he's

00:30:46.780 the ultimate guy for self-development, right? If he can't save the incels, no one can. But that

00:30:52.200 was his kind of take on it. So that was that need for recognition. The second is moral elitism. So

00:30:58.240 they scored high on believing that the individual or their in-group behaves more morally than others.

00:31:04.200 The third is a lack of empathy. Wait, can we pause on that? Sorry, William. This is like

00:31:07.540 absolutely brilliant. I'm so glad we had you in to talk about this. When you talk about this second

00:31:13.120 point uh can you expand on that a little bit so uh so that was the moral elitism yeah like

00:31:18.640 in what way do incels incels think they're morally superior to the rest of us right so they might

00:31:23.880 maybe categorize female mate preferences or uh our kind of mating behavior as quite superficial

00:31:30.900 and shallow right like they'll be like women like money and tall guys even though i'm a really nice 1.00

00:31:36.860 guy on the inside right that guy's an idiot and you can make the argument particularly if you're 0.99

00:31:41.180 short man, you can make the argument for that being 1.00

00:31:43.220 the preference for height being quite

00:31:44.980 arbitrary and shallow and superficial, but

00:31:46.940 you know, it doesn't serve me

00:31:49.180 very well to hunker down into that argument

00:31:51.080 you gotta go on the compensation game

00:31:53.340 real hard, that's the tactic

00:31:55.020 but yeah, that's the kind of moral elitism

00:31:57.260 that they have

00:31:58.020 then there's the lack of empathy, so that's a

00:32:01.120 belief that because of their past victimisation

00:32:03.320 that they feel entitled to enact pain

00:32:05.160 on others, and

00:32:06.840 they say, oh well no one cares about my pain

00:32:09.300 so why should I care about yours

00:32:10.740 incels score high on that dimension too and the final one is rumination so they have a tendency

00:32:16.200 to constantly ruminate on past instances of perceived victimization and that might that

00:32:22.380 rumination piece might point a pathway to a therapeutic way out for incels they're quite

00:32:27.540 resistant to therapy initially anyway but i have some ideas on that too but tackling the rumination

00:32:33.660 through what's called metacognitive therapy which is thinking about your thinking and kind of

00:32:39.020 cultivating an internal locus of control so that incels believe they can actually affect change

00:32:43.980 in their environment. Because that's one thing we found from our study was that the belief in

00:32:49.140 the permanency of inceldom was a significant predictor of depression and anxiety among incels.

00:32:54.880 Well, right. If you think your life's going to be shit forever, that sort of would make you 0.98

00:32:57.960 depressed, I'd imagine. So cracking that black pill is actually crucial. Yeah. So yeah, let's 0.99

00:33:03.740 talk about the way out because like i say i don't think victimhood is ever it's not going to help

00:33:09.260 particularly men because society doesn't feel sorry for men for reasons you'll you're better

00:33:13.980 qualified to to elaborate on than i am so the my answer would always be the jordan peterson answer

00:33:20.740 we just talked about which is at the end of the day you have to you have to be better right the

00:33:27.040 reason women aren't attracted to you is their perception of your mate value is low yeah right 0.96

00:33:32.880 now you need to raise that yeah and actually one of the ways that men are somewhat beneficiaries

00:33:37.700 of the system is that it's much harder for a woman to raise a mate value than it is for a man

00:33:42.580 because for the men talk about superficial men are all about the looks like you can't really

00:33:47.600 change that too much as a woman as a guy if if you think that women are shallow and they want 0.99

00:33:52.860 money well but there's some things you can do about that there yeah you know if it's is it

00:33:57.460 charisma is it being funny is it whatever those things are those are actually things you can

00:34:02.660 work on. Right. Right. And I would argue that is going to be a big part of any solution to coming

00:34:08.700 out of that situation. Right. Yeah, absolutely. And I very much agree with you for the most part

00:34:14.100 about male mate value being more kind of changeable and you can work on it except for the height. And

00:34:20.080 that is a significant one because it's a very kind of stark finding that there's a cutoff point for

00:34:26.200 most women with in terms of height. But for the most part, I certainly agree with you. But it 0.95

00:34:31.500 depends on what our goal should be that all of that is based on the assumption that the goal

00:34:35.280 should be that the incel majority of incels should go out and get girlfriends now that might be the

00:34:41.700 psychologically healthy thing for maybe even most incels but there will be a significant minority

00:34:47.720 where that would actually be cause of more anxiety and actually that could be really

00:34:51.920 uncomfortable for the women that they go out and try and pull because these are not well-adjusted

00:34:56.520 people to be in a relationship and you mentioned oh there's charisma and there's personality for

00:35:01.320 sure but there's also the halo effect that we perceive people who are attractive to have better

00:35:06.120 personalities it's also not that easy to just develop a very winning personality particularly

00:35:11.060 if you're anxious already it's kind of hard to go out and do that a lot of incels report to being

00:35:17.080 autistic it's not something i measured in my study but they've done their own in-house uh studies on

00:35:21.940 that to say that the the over-representation of autistic people in among incels um so yeah that

00:35:28.440 cultivating a winning personality isn't isn't that easy um yeah but see this is what people

00:35:34.980 like you're not allowed to say this in modern society but things like anxiety for the most part

00:35:40.020 they're not without cause like when i was 18 years old i remember that it was the first time i went

00:35:45.640 to get a job i'd go to the student employment office at my university and i would be sweating

00:35:50.500 buckets because i was so anxious i didn't know what to do i felt uncomfortable i thought they'd

00:35:55.500 judge me for not having any, all of that, right?

00:35:58.840 Anxiety is very often simply a symptom of the fact

00:36:01.620 that you're not prepared for the situation

00:36:03.780 that you're putting aside.

00:36:04.800 And everything you want, everything you want in life

00:36:08.400 lies at the other end of a journey of a lot of anxiety.

00:36:12.040 That's just life, right?

00:36:13.720 And so you're not going to get anywhere

00:36:15.520 if being anxious is stopping you from doing stuff.

00:36:18.900 And the only way you get less anxious

00:36:20.740 is by doing stuff that makes you anxious.

00:36:22.500 That's been my experience.

00:36:23.460 Yeah, and you tap into something there,

00:36:25.340 actually uh and to get like to be sexually successful with women you have to really love

00:36:30.300 women and really want it right and willing to put yourself out there through all the pain and

00:36:34.520 rejection and come out the other side right maybe it's just maybe there's a like a an element where

00:36:41.020 it's just not that it's not worth the pain for incels now perhaps it's linked to pornography

00:36:46.120 meeting those sexual needs at home at an easier level um but that's perhaps only going to get

00:36:52.560 worse if you think of virtual reality pornography sex robots things like that are going to exacerbate

00:36:58.720 that problem a little bit more so you tell me then what what are the answers how how do the

00:37:02.860 the majority of installs let's say who maybe can function in a relationship well right how do how

00:37:08.700 how do they get to where they want because the thing is underneath all the depression the anxiety 0.90

00:37:13.320 and and all the hatred and all the bullshit yeah these are just young men who want to who want to

00:37:17.680 have a girlfriend right and there's nothing wrong with that that's a beautiful thing to aspire to 0.96

00:37:21.360 So how do they get there if they're watching this?

00:37:23.480 So there is the issue of which direction is the causality.

00:37:27.540 Are they depressed because they can't get girlfriends

00:37:29.080 or can they not get girlfriends because they're depressed and anxious?

00:37:31.760 But I'd predict that it's bidirectional,

00:37:33.940 that one affects the other and kind of it's cyclical.

00:37:36.620 There is a lot you can do to improve your mating intelligence.

00:37:40.140 You can, and like, you know, the figures I pointed to

00:37:42.380 about being neat and still living at home,

00:37:44.860 those are fundamental things that I think would be improvable.

00:37:48.180 A lot of the time with young men, particularly to young incels,

00:37:51.140 I know they would think it's patronizing when I advised them on this, but just even waiting until you're 30 rather than 20 is such a game changer for men in terms of, because women typically don't really like to go out with men that are much younger than them.

00:38:06.360 So when you're 20, the pool of women that are potentially even interested in you is really small.

00:38:12.200 It's like really close to your age.

00:38:14.300 But as you get up to around 30, the women who are approaching 40 are interested in you

00:38:19.100 and the women who are closer to 20 are potentially interested in you too. 0.99

00:38:23.580 So just a sheer age thing is important.

00:38:26.920 And you accrue more status as you get older.

00:38:29.260 You achieve more in life and have more to show, get a bit more experience socially.

00:38:34.120 So yeah, I think there is a lot just fundamentally

00:38:37.080 on their socioeconomic status that we could do.

00:38:41.040 But the incels would probably say,

00:38:43.420 yes, okay, I hear you, I need to improve.

00:38:46.000 But what they're really railing against

00:38:48.140 is the sudden unfairness of it

00:38:51.320 compared to, let's say, the 1950s,

00:38:53.660 where pretty much every man was guaranteed

00:38:56.200 to get a job and to get a wife.

00:39:00.000 They see that that's suddenly culturally

00:39:01.660 been taken away from them really suddenly. And we haven't started rewarding different things.

00:39:07.320 So we've done a great job of bringing women into the workplace. We haven't done a great job of

00:39:11.420 bringing men into the home or that even being considered sexy. You know, maybe we could do 0.53

00:39:16.920 both things. Maybe we could try and improve the socioeconomic status of young men on one hand,

00:39:21.560 and maybe we could also start rewarding things like stay-at-home father and things like that.

00:39:26.640 But one study pointed to women's mate preferences

00:39:29.600 that just 5% said that they desired a relationship

00:39:33.020 where they work full-time and men work part-time or not at all.

00:39:36.800 That's just 5%.

00:39:37.500 This is what I was going to say, man.

00:39:38.880 As an evolutionary psychologist,

00:39:40.180 do you think that's ever going to happen, though?

00:39:42.080 Because I'm not sure we're wired that way, are we?

00:39:44.620 It's not.

00:39:45.500 It doesn't seem to be.

00:39:46.640 It hasn't been the tendency cross-culturally at most places.

00:39:49.620 But it's a very unique evolutionary novel time.

00:39:52.640 And what mate preferences are really sensitive to

00:39:54.980 is what we reward culturally, what we assign status to.

00:39:59.300 So you can assign status about anything.

00:40:01.440 Actually, that's a bit of advice I'd give to incels.

00:40:03.820 Create your own status game.

00:40:05.380 Find your little niche.

00:40:06.740 Because I'm never going to be a great mating success

00:40:09.820 if I go to the nightclub and try to pull the Love Island gym bunny, right?

00:40:14.420 Not going to happen.

00:40:15.540 They want a different type of guy.

00:40:16.980 But if I'm at a debate festival or something like that

00:40:20.180 and intellectually stimulating kind of environment,

00:40:23.260 I might blow someone's hair back, you know?

00:40:24.980 of that's my kind of arena um so you really have to and there's any amount of uh status domains now

00:40:31.480 so i would encourage yourselves to kind of find a smaller niche because proximity alone uh breeds

00:40:38.120 kind of intimacy as well you know but that's another thing that often people used to meet

00:40:43.800 their partner at work and that's problematic now suddenly uh which is um it's it seems a

00:40:50.500 a bit of a kind of a not well thought out idea to just say suddenly you shouldn't do that at all.

00:40:56.340 I'm thinking of my former colleague. She used to really want to meet someone and she wouldn't go

00:41:02.360 online. She wouldn't go on the online dating apps. And I said, where are you going to meet someone?

00:41:06.460 You leave the office at five, you get on the train, and then you're home to sleep. And then

00:41:11.220 you're back in the office again. If you're not going to meet someone at the office, are you going

00:41:14.860 to meet someone on the train and you won't go on the apps? So it was like she's really creating a

00:41:19.640 a really small world for herself and it was a struggle.

00:41:24.520 Hey Konstantin, do you love trigonometry?

00:41:28.080 I'm from Russia, I cannot love anything

00:41:30.800 apart from vodka, miserable literature 0.75

00:41:33.640 and the horrendous downfall of my people.

00:41:36.080 But yes, I find trigonometry satisfactory.

00:41:39.040 And do you like live shows?

00:41:41.560 Of course, but only if it's Chekhov play

00:41:44.440 about collapse of Russian aristocracy

00:41:47.000 as they face death and obscurity

00:41:49.120 before the glorious might of the proletariat

00:41:51.700 and the beautiful revolution.

00:41:53.900 Okay, mate.

00:41:55.120 Well, if you like trigonometry live shows,

00:41:57.720 then get your credit card out for the lads

00:42:00.660 because we're coming to the Edinburgh Festival this August.

00:42:04.940 We have only booked two shows, August 6th and 7th,

00:42:08.240 because if we do more,

00:42:09.140 the comedy industry will treat us like the czars

00:42:11.680 and execute us. 0.78

00:42:12.700 That's right. 0.98

00:42:13.620 We're going to be in Edinburgh for two days only.

00:42:16.900 Saturday's guest is Andrew Doyle, which is sure to sell out.

00:42:21.140 Our other guest is Leo Kearse, which means when Nicola Sturgeon hears about it,

00:42:25.780 she'll ban us from Scotland herself. 0.89

00:42:27.700 Tickets are sure to sell out, and when they're gone, they're gone.

00:42:31.920 Click on the link below, and we'll see you in Edinburgh

00:42:34.480 on the 6th and 7th of August at the Gilded Balloon Teviot.

00:42:39.800 Come and see us before hordes of left-wing comedians try to put us in gulag.

00:42:44.180 what advice would you give if you see a friend or a little brother or maybe your son

00:42:50.560 start progressing down this path and you can see spending more and more time online

00:42:55.380 maybe saying things that start ringing alarm bells in your head how do you help someone like that

00:43:00.720 uh yeah i think it is uh about kind of uh cultivating a meaning in in young people's

00:43:07.080 lives beyond just this kind of online identity and you know get them more active doing more

00:43:14.560 things hobbies in my previous professional background I worked as a careers advisor

00:43:19.460 and the we have a kind of a big problem in schools where young people are just doing less stuff

00:43:25.020 it's like you know you in my class if you ask people what your hobbies were they had all sorts

00:43:30.160 of different hobbies or they were going different places or out and about engaging with the world

00:43:34.820 whereas now it's kind of

00:43:37.060 I don't do anything

00:43:38.200 I'm just gaming

00:43:39.200 or I'm online

00:43:40.100 I don't want to kind of

00:43:41.460 you know really

00:43:43.160 villainize gaming

00:43:44.480 or anything like that

00:43:45.340 no I'm a massive gamer

00:43:46.480 I love games

00:43:47.100 and it can be

00:43:48.300 but in my time

00:43:49.580 I used to be when I had time

00:43:51.080 yeah

00:43:51.460 right

00:43:51.880 but it used to be kind of

00:43:53.100 more community based

00:43:54.100 right

00:43:54.340 where you gather around

00:43:55.400 and you play Nintendo 64

00:43:56.960 against each other

00:43:57.660 now it seems to be a very

00:43:59.080 locked into a headset

00:44:00.500 not even talking to someone

00:44:02.720 who could be far around

00:44:03.980 the other side of the world. It just seems a bit more of an insular, isolated thing.

00:44:09.620 And that would suggest, from what you're saying there, that actually, we're going to see the

00:44:15.040 incel community grow. Because as we become more online, more men are going to become disenfranchised,

00:44:21.480 therefore more incels. Yeah, there's no sign that this wider mating crisis, which affects more than

00:44:26.780 just incels, it affects women as well. Investment bankers Morgan Stanley released a forecast

00:44:33.040 saying that by the year 2030, they predict that 44% of working age women will be single and

00:44:39.380 childless, which is great for them having the access to a lot of worker drones. But is it clear

00:44:44.980 that single and childless, and I'm libertarian, as far as people's choices go, I want people to

00:44:50.520 be able to be full time, stay at home, mom, work full time, work part time, whatever you want.

00:44:56.320 But it's not clear that working for Morgan Stanley, a 60-hour work week, is that liberating compared to starting a family.

00:45:06.540 That seemed like, they call it the rise of the she-economy.

00:45:10.120 And it's like they've figured out, oh, the workplace now, women are really killing it in the workplace.

00:45:14.860 We have access to them.

00:45:16.280 So that's a kind of a stark prediction.

00:45:20.940 And how much of this, again, this is going to be a controversial question.

00:45:24.180 how much of this is actually there's a lot there's some women out there have got unrealistic

00:45:28.960 expectations we just touched on it about what they're going to get from a mate you often hear

00:45:33.960 it with women with women in London I want a man who's six foot who earns this amount of money

00:45:38.480 who does this who does that who's good looking who's funny who's and I'm like you've just

00:45:42.280 described the gay bloke love so you're never gonna but but yeah but on the other side then

00:45:48.260 if you are a single woman, why wouldn't you want that? And if there's no reason why you should

00:45:54.080 take anything less, why should they settle? They don't need the economic support. So my single

00:45:59.300 female friends, they're looking for love. They're looking for a great guy. And you know,

00:46:04.420 my pushback to that would be you're looking for something that is completely idealized and doesn't

00:46:09.120 exist in the real world. There is no such thing as a perfect guy. But they might say that unless

00:46:14.140 they can have their idealized version of perfect they would prefer be single and this is actually

00:46:19.780 a cross a failure of cross-sex mind reading for incels because they always say oh there's no such

00:46:25.440 thing as a female incel because they can always get something they just need women just need to

00:46:30.380 lower their standards and they can get access to sex but i think they're underestimating just the 0.99

00:46:35.740 extent to which women don't want to have sex with men they don't want to have sex with right yeah 0.77

00:46:41.080 It's not a net good for them.

00:46:42.740 It's actually a cost inflicting.

00:46:44.340 And also women aren't looking for sex anyway.

00:46:46.340 Right, or even to settle with a guy,

00:46:48.860 you know, to have to lower their standards.

00:46:50.820 They see that as, well, something is better than nothing.

00:46:53.560 Whereas women are like, no, no, it really isn't. 0.95

00:46:56.300 It actually would inflict a cost on me

00:46:58.300 because they risk a lot with sex, you know?

00:47:00.500 Yeah, that's really, really interesting.

00:47:04.000 Wow, this is a 44% single childless woman.

00:47:06.780 I mean, that is not a recipe for a healthy society.

00:47:09.300 Perhaps not, yeah, considering.

00:47:11.080 What we know about young male syndrome and kind of this.

00:47:14.280 Yeah, but it's not good for young women because women want to have a partner and to have kids, a lot of them.

00:47:20.940 And the societal impact of that society are just really, really worrying.

00:47:25.260 Because if we go even more historically through our evolutionary history, 83% of human societies have been preferentially polygynous, meaning one man and multiple wives.

00:47:35.500 so the cultures that began to practice monogamy

00:47:39.200 began to flourish more than cultures that didn't

00:47:42.580 because the main cultural advantage of monogamy

00:47:45.320 is the egalitarian distribution of women

00:47:48.060 and your viewers are probably going to really chastise me 0.99

00:47:50.420 to talk about distribution of women

00:47:52.220 You're speaking as a scientist as opposed to...

00:47:54.940 Don't cancel me

00:47:56.520 If we talked about the distribution of women

00:47:58.500 it'd be a different thing 1.00

00:47:59.380 but you're speaking professionally

00:48:00.720 So tell us about bird distribution

00:48:02.580 so if you do have that surplus population of young men if you they're out status seeking

00:48:10.640 they're out competing for mates if you free them up from that competition they have an investment

00:48:16.140 in society and their economic output goes up and they're not killing each other as much they're

00:48:21.820 not smashing each other's faces and outside the weather spoons because they've got a wife and two

00:48:25.480 kids at home right exactly they've got an investment at stake in the future um but it's

00:48:31.240 funny because uh there was an anthropologist called helen fisher who works with match.com

00:48:35.560 on their kind of relationship scientist stuff she was uh she asked um a kind of i can't remember

00:48:41.740 what culture it was but it was a polygynous culture uh she asked the man who had three wives

00:48:46.800 she was walking along with him she said how many wives would you want in an ideal world

00:48:52.000 and he had three and he just paused and leaned in close and said none because in polygynous

00:49:00.560 marriages the sister wives fight a lot they poison each other's children it's no picnic like so the

00:49:06.300 monogamy cultural norm and I'm all for freedom and for people to have individual choice for however

00:49:11.980 they want to build their life and relationship structure remain single be polyamorous whatever

00:49:16.220 it is you want to do that's my sensibility on it but it is an absolute finding that a strong

00:49:23.000 cultural norm of monogamy has led cultures to flourish for that very reason and do you think

00:49:28.480 another part of the problem as well is that, like you intimated, our society, we've become more

00:49:35.620 feminized. We've become more feminized. We've become, certainly the education system has,

00:49:41.000 we celebrate femininity more. We don't do the same with masculinity. We talk about toxic masculinity.

00:49:48.840 So a lot of the time you go online, it does feel like in many ways, quite an anti-masculine space.

00:49:54.460 Yeah, and something I'd add to that is what I would call the obligation for success.

00:50:00.080 So we've done a great job of egalitarianism of a woman could leave school

00:50:04.260 or a girl could leave school and say, I'm going to be a stay-at-home mom,

00:50:07.920 I'm going to work part-time, or I'm going to work full-time.

00:50:10.920 The man doesn't have that option.

00:50:12.200 He leaves school and knows he has success, success, or success,

00:50:16.080 or he's not going to find a partner, really.

00:50:20.760 I'd quibble with you on the woman's stay-at-home mom

00:50:23.220 because a lot of women are demonized, actually, for making that choice,

00:50:26.280 which is, again, a problem, I think.

00:50:28.540 And you could see maybe how that might be driven

00:50:30.200 by the likes of Morgan Stanley.

00:50:32.060 Well, quite, quite.

00:50:33.140 And also as well, what about the geographical element of it?

00:50:35.860 Because I would imagine that if you grew up, for instance,

00:50:38.980 in a town somewhere outside of London,

00:50:41.420 which has got very little industry,

00:50:43.560 poor areas like the northeast or maybe the southwest like Cornwall,

00:50:46.700 you're more likely to be an incel because there's just less opportunity.

00:50:49.740 Yeah, absolutely. And that's what the researchers found, that they could predict the geographic areas based on high income inequality. So just that overall and the lower gender pay gaps.

00:51:01.280 Although I'd imagine, actually, London would be much more likely

00:51:04.220 to be somewhere that meets those standards, wouldn't it?

00:51:06.780 Perhaps.

00:51:07.380 Higher income inequality?

00:51:08.880 Overall, perhaps, yeah.

00:51:10.080 And what you might see there in London

00:51:12.160 is more of that status-striving-seeking behaviour.

00:51:15.040 You've got knife crime where forming a gang

00:51:17.620 or getting involved in gang violence might be actually a strategy

00:51:20.300 to achieve enough status in your little arena.

00:51:23.860 If you have no economic chance,

00:51:25.560 you might as well take your chance on gang violence.

00:51:27.480 Yeah.

00:51:28.080 And let me ask you, this is unrelated,

00:51:29.860 but you brought it up in terms of monogamy is that is how natural is that to human beings

00:51:38.420 right so i actually gave a talk on the evolution of monogamy uh and the answer is that we kind of

00:51:46.160 have evolved psychology for both uh so you know uh infidelity exists in every culture in the world

00:51:55.100 even in those punishable by death.

00:51:57.840 But we also have pair-bonding psychology.

00:52:01.060 There's a lot about our biology that points to us being

00:52:03.520 more naturally kind of monogamous or at least pair-bonding.

00:52:07.540 But humans have always kind of serially mated.

00:52:10.240 They mate, they leave their mate, they form another mateship.

00:52:13.500 It's not like strict monogamy always.

00:52:16.380 And without the cultural norm,

00:52:18.200 you tend to maybe veer more towards polygyny.

00:52:21.360 But like I was saying, we're very sensitive to

00:52:25.100 to those cultural cues so if you make literally that's what happened you had agriculture came

00:52:29.740 around and you got stark inequality of mating success so people were able to for the first time

00:52:35.080 stockpile resources and get massive income inequality and they monopolized the mating

00:52:40.020 opportunities too so to stop that you had to create the cultures that created a strong

00:52:46.020 cultural norm of monogamy that it's tough to stick to at times um but if there's a strong

00:52:54.180 cultural norm people will strive to stick to it and that leads cultures to flourish so so with

00:52:59.360 that in mind then and the stuff that we've been talking about today with the dating apps with the

00:53:03.600 fact that a large number of men are excluded from that or certainly feel excluded are we sort of

00:53:10.080 heading towards a direction where there's less monogamy and the elite quote-unquote men at the

00:53:16.320 top are hoovering up more than one woman at a time and and playing that field for longer and

00:53:23.120 And maybe you start to see cultural movements where you're going,

00:53:27.580 well, if a man can afford to, blah, blah, blah,

00:53:29.960 then why shouldn't he have three wives? Do you know what I mean?

00:53:32.140 Yeah, that would be, I mean, it's radical to kind of think of it, but it's not.

00:53:36.360 It seems the direction we're going in just on the foundational data.

00:53:41.160 Because some of the data shows that the mating pattern

00:53:43.480 is kind of like effective polygyny.

00:53:45.620 So one statistic about that is compared to 2002,

00:53:49.040 men in 2013 had similar number of mates overall. But what they showed was the top 20%

00:53:56.260 had a huge, like 25% increase in the number of mates. And the top 5% of men had a massive 38%

00:54:06.560 increase. So it was really, really dramatic, this big skew. I think with the economy,

00:54:11.520 given that women can like earn their own money very well, it's less likely that they'll say

00:54:16.900 they need to share a mate they don't typically like to do that unless they have to right so it's

00:54:22.440 a and one of the advantages to polygyny that they always say is oh well women have access to a high

00:54:28.740 quality mate and they can share them but they don't really like to do that so unless they have

00:54:32.140 to i think we're more likely to see a rise of singlehood and kind of this atomized sexual kind

00:54:38.780 of culture where you have sexual experiences become more individual and less long-term

00:54:45.480 commitment perhaps um that seems to me like i mean it's not great for men but for women that is just

00:54:52.140 awful perhaps and perhaps for children too because uh completely two parents has always but that's

00:54:58.120 that's really not what women tend to be looking for like they'll they might pretend that they are

00:55:02.300 but but generally speaking in the long run that's not what they're looking for and if you've got an

00:55:07.040 environment where that's happening there's going to be a lot of miserable people sure but the

00:55:11.420 evolved preference for women to kind of seek a male with resources who will provision her and

00:55:17.260 her offspring with resources is because for the vast majority of revolutionary history that was

00:55:21.580 important if it's no longer the case if she can get her own work and provision her child as well

00:55:27.940 as getting a mate then maybe it's not as much of a problem but i think well you think we're going

00:55:35.560 get to a point where a senior executive at Goldman Sachs, who's female, is going to be

00:55:42.300 quite comfortable dating a guy who just plays video games all day. I don't see that happening.

00:55:47.240 No, certainly not. No, I would see that she would probably rather than commit to someone

00:55:52.420 lower status than herself, that she will concentrate her mating towards those minority

00:55:57.860 of men she's interested in. But of course, they will be commitment adverse because they're in

00:56:01.720 the minority and she will struggle to get them to commit. So there is some evidence. So I always

00:56:07.440 like debate with other researchers about whether we're in this mating crisis at all, because they

00:56:11.140 point to some evidence that hypergamy is actually a little bit in decline. So women are inevitably,

00:56:16.720 as they succeed so well in the workplace, are beginning to mate down. So like marry men who

00:56:22.720 earn less than themselves or are less educated. But even the researchers in that paper, they say

00:56:28.560 we can't speak to the perceived difficulties women have felt in seeking this mate.

00:56:33.840 And there's also some really worrying evidence that shows

00:56:36.820 that domestic violence instances are,

00:56:40.900 it's a huge predictor if the man in the partnership earns,

00:56:44.500 this is a new study out based on 21,000 women across 24 EU countries

00:56:49.220 talking about a big predictor of intimate partner violence

00:56:52.720 is the man earning less than the woman of all different types.

00:56:56.200 So that's when a man feels insecure, that's the risk factor when he feels like he's potentially

00:57:01.740 about to lose his mate, which is more likely if he's earning less than her. So that's a worrying

00:57:08.140 finding. We also see that this decline in hypergamy has appeared in lockstep with an increase

00:57:15.020 in female, not male, infidelity. So male infidelity has always been quite common and 0.58

00:57:20.720 quite prevalent. But that's remained stable over time. Whereas female infidelity has increased 40%

00:57:26.480 in the last 50 years. Well, that makes sense. I mean, if your perceived mate value of your partner

00:57:31.320 is lower, then of course you're going to be more likely to... And if you're in a world where your

00:57:36.320 peers are these really impressive dudes in the bank or whatever it might be, yeah, and access

00:57:42.940 to do it anonymously with no reputation damage. Yeah, but that's a stark finding, a 40% increase

00:57:49.200 in 50 years. What a happy world you're painting for us. Right. We seem, this has been a brilliant

00:57:55.020 interview. Great, thanks. But one of the things we don't seem to have spoken about when it comes

00:57:59.740 to ourselves, just bringing it back to them, is the element, the biological element, which is

00:58:04.720 testosterone. How much do we know about the incels and testosterone levels? Are these simply people

00:58:11.440 who are suffering from low testosterone, which would explain a lot of the behaviours, it would

00:58:15.100 explain things like depression, etc. It's interesting. I was contacted a couple of weeks

00:58:19.860 ago by a team of researchers who want to get a study that and actually measure testosterone

00:58:25.100 levels. I think it would be very interesting. A couple of conflicting hypotheses on that.

00:58:31.040 In our study, we found that incels scored very high on sociosexual desire, which they have a lot

00:58:36.120 of desire. So that would indicate a lot of testosterone. And what drops someone's testosterone

00:58:40.660 is, Constantine, I'm sorry,

00:58:42.900 you might not want to hear this,

00:58:43.920 but having a child.

00:58:45.180 As soon as the man has a child,

00:58:46.840 his testosterone drops him.

00:58:47.300 I'm ready to transition, mate.

00:58:49.840 Oh, don't say that.

00:58:50.920 People will turn the rumor.

00:58:53.380 But yeah, so when they have a child,

00:58:55.600 evolution wants them to concentrate

00:58:57.180 on staying at home,

00:58:59.160 not out gallivanting, right?

00:59:00.720 So the T drops down a bit.

00:59:02.920 So that's one hypothesis,

00:59:04.260 that incels might have higher testosterone. 0.70

00:59:06.320 But you would predict

00:59:07.340 that they'd be out seeking mates

00:59:08.760 more with that.

00:59:10.660 And another hypothesis is that they're not seeking mates

00:59:13.700 because they're low on T

00:59:14.800 and it'd be interesting to find out one way or the other.

00:59:18.120 But your levels are also affected by behavior as well.

00:59:21.260 Like having a mate, having success with mates,

00:59:23.900 that would raise your testosterone levels, wouldn't it?

00:59:25.900 And also watching pornography lowers your testosterone.

00:59:29.740 I'm not sure about watching pornography lower testosterone,

00:59:33.940 but it might interfere with mating mechanisms

00:59:36.680 like where we spoke about the counterfeit fitness cues

00:59:39.780 because the message is

00:59:41.560 you're achieving mating success

00:59:42.760 so it wouldn't stand to reason

00:59:44.020 that it would lower testosterone inherently.

00:59:47.880 No, I appreciate we're talking to a scientist

00:59:49.320 so our standards for evidence are different.

00:59:51.880 Your standard is a research paper.

00:59:53.940 Our standard is,

00:59:54.740 oh, I remember reading somewhere that,

00:59:56.620 and I do remember reading somewhere that,

00:59:58.900 I'm sorry to make it explicit, 0.99

01:00:01.880 but it's masturbating to pornography 0.99

01:00:03.740 lowers your testosterone. 0.99

01:00:05.060 I do remember seeing that somewhere.

01:00:06.580 Could be wrong, fact check me.

01:00:07.840 I do think that a lot of kind of porn research

01:00:10.700 is very ideologically by religious groups.

01:00:14.080 So tread very carefully, I would say.

01:00:17.080 I can put you in touch with a couple of porn researchers

01:00:19.200 I would trust on it.

01:00:20.960 I'm certainly not an expert on it.

01:00:23.260 William, it's been an absolutely brilliant interview.

01:00:26.720 Thank you so much for coming on the show.

01:00:28.740 The final question we always ask is,

01:00:30.300 what's the one thing we're not talking about,

01:00:31.940 but we really should be?

01:00:33.220 Well, I think we began to talk about it a little bit today.

01:00:36.220 that kind of wider mating crisis.

01:00:39.120 But something totally different,

01:00:40.860 if I can just give two examples,

01:00:42.940 free speech,

01:00:43.900 because I think people really pay lip service

01:00:46.100 to free speech

01:00:47.640 and don't really stand by it as a value.

01:00:49.780 So fair play to you and the program.

01:00:51.380 I know that's a fundamental value

01:00:52.940 of your kind of mission statement.

01:00:55.040 And I certainly felt like I could speak freely

01:00:57.340 in the interview.

01:00:58.280 So that was great.

01:00:59.580 Thanks.

01:00:59.900 Thank you so much.

01:01:00.860 It's been an absolute pleasure.

01:01:02.240 We're going to ask you a couple of questions

01:01:03.800 from our local supporters

01:01:05.580 that only they get to see in a second.

01:01:08.500 But before we let you go,

01:01:10.000 where's the best place to follow your work?

01:01:12.280 How should people keep up with your research and so on?

01:01:14.520 So like a lot of academics,

01:01:16.380 I spend far too much time on Twitter.

01:01:18.680 So my handle is at Costello William.

01:01:21.660 So my name just inversed.

01:01:23.300 And you'll find I'll post about all our latest research

01:01:26.220 and studies and things like that all the time.

01:01:29.040 Fantastic.

01:01:29.560 William, thank you so much.

01:01:30.880 Make sure to go and follow him.

01:01:32.460 And thank you for watching and listening.

01:01:34.600 We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or Raw Show.

01:01:39.580 All of them go out at 7 p.m. UK time.

01:01:41.600 And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.

01:01:46.400 Take care and see you soon, guys.

01:01:49.400 Is incelhood not simply a form of narcissism?

01:01:53.320 compliance moves fast and moody's can help organizations move even faster leveraging

01:02:06.820 ai to help you gain quicker insights and reduce bottlenecks let moody's help your organization

01:02:11.340 navigate change with confidence visit moody's.com slash kyc slash ai dash study to discover how

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TRIGGERnometry - August 01, 2022

The Truth About Incels

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