The Truth About Incels
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 2 minutes
Words per Minute
180.6637
Summary
Dr. William Costello is a PhD researcher in the field of evolutionary psychology. He has a particular interest in the online subculture of incels, an online group of men who form a strong sense of identity around what they perceive as their inability to form sexual or romantic relationships. They believe in something called the Black Pill, which means that there is simply nothing they can do to improve their romantic prospects and that it's over for them in terms of competing on the mating market.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
We wanted to kind of investigate the political attitudes a little bit more.
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.
00:00:59.440
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.
00:01:15.300
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
00:01:26.420
So we thought it would be really good to get you on to talk about it more.
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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?
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Sure. So I moved from Ireland to England for my undergraduate degree 11 years ago.
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Just last year, I graduated from Brunel University, London, with a master's in psychology, culture and evolution.
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My research dissertation topic was incel psychology.
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And my colleague and co-author, she always jokes to me that people say that research is me-search.
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So I have no comment on that from my side of things.
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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.
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And yeah, so that's kind of me and my journey in a nutshell.
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And it's good to see you've lost the action in 11 years as well.
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And David Buss, of course, being the founder of basically the creator of the field of evolutionary psychology.
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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.
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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.
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Right. So incels are a kind of an online subculture community of men who form a strong
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sense of their identity around what they perceive as their inability to form sexual or romantic
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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
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market. A significant minority of incels engage in what we call misogynistic online hostility.
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But one study found that just 10% of incels are responsible for the vast majority of the
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extreme hateful content online. So like any other group, it's kind of tends to be the fringe
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minorities within that community that shout the loudest and maybe get used as emblematic of that
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community in rarer instances still incels have lashed out in violent rage the most famous case
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is Elliot Rodger who in Ilsa Vista in California in 2014 he wrote a 49-page manifesto talking about
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how he wanted to have a day of retribution where he would kill chads who are the sexually
00:04:02.560
successful men mean you mate right yeah and and uh and so stacy's are the the sexually
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
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is what i wanted to kind of study but always in the media you'll see two cases always brought up
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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
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other day been sentenced to 25 years to life. So worldwide, the incel death count attributable
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to incels is about 50 to 60. Alec Manazian alone can account for 10 of those. And he's
00:05:20.080
with the way the media report on the incel problem
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to these attackers, it could potentially inspire future spree killers.
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You know, I mean, if you were seeking to gain notoriety,
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you can get your YouTube videos splashed all over the news,
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and that goes directly against kind of media guidelines
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from anti-terrorism kind of organizations and male supremacists.
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Particularly when you're dealing with people who are low status,
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that would seem to be a very dangerous thing to be doing.
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So it's kind of, it's a dangerous game to play.
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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.
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We tend to rail against that attitude about other groups.
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For example, it's harmful to stereotype Muslims as terrorists based on the actions of an extreme minority.
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So those figures maybe might come as surprising to some people
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who kind of think, well, the vast majority of incels are misogynistic
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William, it sounds like you've got a great deal of sympathy for these people,
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Well, yeah, I mean, my sexual and romantic relationships in my life
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have been some of the most enriching experiences available to people.
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So for that to come, for it to happen that incels form their identity
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to have such psychological pain with the prospect of trying to form romantic relationships that it
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forms their identity, I imagine that must be a significant kind of pain. And, you know, I just
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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
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judgmental here how much of this is just a load of blokes just being incredibly self-pitying
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and going poor me poor me poor me because look there's all been times in our lives where we've
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struggled to get a date we've struggled to get a girlfriend is it really the answer to go online
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and then feel sorry for yourself or am I being incredibly unsympathetic uh right no you're not
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wrong and you know we've it's a to be sexually successful you have to kind of go through a lot
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of rejection right and it may be the case that incels are just very high on rejection sensitivity
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and uh but it could be that just participating in the mating market causes them a lot more anxiety
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than the typical person but i think you might be familiar that uh victimhood is in vogue these days
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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
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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
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for, and a lot of studies have been done to show what percentage of incels do this and
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that, and the psychological traits that predispose people.
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So if we talk about the mainstream media coverage, I want to just come back to that for a second.
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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
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,
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and it was a largely US and UK sample, so that is disproportionate. Fewer incels were white
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Do they come predominantly from one type of background?
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Is it like Black Caribbean, Black African, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, etc.?
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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
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because the majority were white, given our sample was US and UK.
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but nothing overwhelming of one particular minority.
00:10:06.020
the idea that they might be white supremacist and far right
00:10:13.700
with what they see as the racism of the mating market.
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and there is perhaps some statistics that bear that true.
00:10:26.920
to be concerned about racism on the dating market, right?
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Can we just double-click on that quickly before?
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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.
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But one of the ways is that they say, oh, it's quite racist.
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People's dating preferences are somewhat racist.
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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.
00:11:09.900
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
00:11:20.240
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.
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67% of incels could have severe or moderate anxiety based on NHS guidelines versus 38% of non-incels.
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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
00:12:02.120
but we did ask one question about political attitudes
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
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
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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.
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Because particularly for men, socioeconomic status is a very important factor.
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What it sounds like when you're describing these men,
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and I'm actually getting more and more sympathy the more that we go through this interview,
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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.
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In the evolutionary psychology literature, we call that young male syndrome.
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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
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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.
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
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who otherwise would have been sitting in their mother's basement
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and playing computer games, well, now they have a community.
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We're all part of some community and we can go online
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and we can talk to other people who are part of that community
00:15:17.760
or is it a case that the tools of modern communication
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.
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However, we had institutions to kind of deal with this kind of surplus population.
00:15:48.580
You had even, unfortunately, maybe an unpalatable idea is the idea of war
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and sending young men off on raids with the promise
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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.
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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.
00:16:44.380
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
00:17:34.080
so that may compound any negative effects on the well-being
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
00:18:04.340
And the way that works negatively is that for an incel,
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
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,
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.
00:20:03.000
that these researchers called Rob Brooks and Candace Blake,
00:20:09.580
of high online incel activity based on three variables.
00:20:18.900
So women earning nearly as much or more than men.
00:20:26.520
So all of those together could predict geographic areas
00:20:33.000
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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
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
00:25:04.060
because I was addicted to football manager as well so I know and it's such a futile sense of
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
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,
00:25:48.860
and the kind of disenfranchisement of young men in society,
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,
00:26:06.040
so they join these communities because they want fraternity
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.
00:27:03.420
And they just hunkered down into the victimhood
00:27:09.040
when you acknowledge or when you explicitly attach
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.
00:27:54.420
I mean, women would never manipulate men together, would they?
00:27:57.120
They'd never put on makeup or anything like that.
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.
00:28:34.580
No one's going to give you shit for being a victim when you're a guy.
00:28:42.680
You're going to have to work, dig your way out of it yourself.
00:28:49.840
Is it something that you think is a genetic predisposition?
00:29:01.220
Yeah, so I'd be very reluctant to kind of pathologize inceldom
00:29:10.980
someone could have enough difficulty in the dating arena
00:29:15.980
that it causes them enough psychological distress
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
00:29:31.940
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
00:29:48.000
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.
00:30:27.000
or what some media might expect Jordan Peterson
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
00:31:36.860
guy on the inside right that guy's an idiot and you can make the argument particularly if you're
00:31:41.180
short man, you can make the argument for that being
00:32:01.120
belief that because of their past victimisation
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
00:32:57.960
depressed, I'd imagine. So cracking that black pill is actually crucial. Yeah. So yeah, let's
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
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
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
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
00:36:04.800
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.
00:36:15.520
if being anxious is stopping you from doing stuff.
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
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
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?
00:37:33.940
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
00:37:44.860
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.
00:38:14.300
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.
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.
00:39:01.660
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
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.
00:39:40.180
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?
00:39:46.640
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.
00:40:01.440
Actually, that's a bit of advice I'd give to incels.
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?
00:40:16.980
But if I'm at a debate festival or something like that
00:40:20.180
and intellectually stimulating kind of environment,
00:40:24.980
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.
00:42:00.660
because we're coming to the Edinburgh Festival this August.
00:42:04.940
We have only booked two shows, August 6th and 7th,
00:42:09.140
the comedy industry will treat us like the czars
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,
00:42:27.700
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
00:44:03.980
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.
00:45:20.940
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
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
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.
00:47:06.780
I mean, that is not a recipe for a healthy society.
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
00:47:48.060
and your viewers are probably going to really chastise me
00:47:52.220
You're speaking as a scientist as opposed to...
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.
00:50:12.200
He leaves school and knows he has success, success, or success,
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,
00:50:28.540
And you could see maybe how that might be driven
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,
00:50:43.560
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?
00:51:12.160
is more of that status-striving-seeking behaviour.
00:51:17.620
or getting involved in gang violence might be actually a strategy
00:51:25.560
you might as well take your chance on gang violence.
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
00:52:01.060
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.
00:52:10.240
They mate, they leave their mate, they form another mateship.
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
00:53:45.620
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
00:56:40.900
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
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
00:59:10.660
And another hypothesis is that they're not seeking mates
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.
00:59:23.900
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,
00:59:36.680
like where we spoke about the counterfeit fitness cues
01:00:17.080
I can put you in touch with a couple of porn researchers
01:00:23.260
William, it's been an absolutely brilliant interview.
01:00:33.220
Well, I think we began to talk about it a little bit today.
01:01:12.280
How should people keep up with your research and so on?
01:01:23.300
And you'll find I'll post about all our latest research
01:01:34.600
We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or Raw Show.
01:01:41.600
And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.
01:01:53.320
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