#853 - Dr Andrew Thomas - Should We Be Worried About Incel Violence?
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Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Andrew Thomas. He's a senior lecturer of psychology at Swansea University and a writer.

The topic of involuntarily celibates is a spicy one. Half of the internet fears them and the other half pities them. Very few have researched about why these communities come together and who constitutes them. Andrew's new work looks at this in pretty fascinating detail. Expect to learn whether incels should be looked at from a mental health perspective, why there isn't more incel violence, what the word incel

means, whether incels are all sexually entitled, what Andrew has learned about men's experiences with female therapists, and much more. This episode is brought to you by Manscaped. If

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and modern wisdom. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Andrew Thomas.

You spoke at the Houses of Parliament. What was that like? I did, yeah. That was daunting. And it was really hot and I decided to wear my three-piece, which was not a good idea. But no, that was a really interesting experience because we produced a piece of research that was funded by an arm's-length body of the Home Office into incels. You very kindly shared that study when it was out to help us with recruitment. That was one of the biggest incel studies to date. And

And the Women in Equality Select Committee were really interested in it. And so they called myself, Joe Whittaker, and Will to come and talk to them about the report a little bit more, which was a fantastic experience, all recorded and online. I didn't realize how they do these things these days, all sort of part of the public record. But hopefully we'll kind of inform policy a little bit and dispel some of the myths around the incel phenomenon, I think, because the

The primary research is what we need to be doing. There's a lot of theoretical stuff out there that's a little bit bad. There's a lot of secondary data analysis, scraping forums and stuff that gives a little bit of a misleading picture. But it was fantastic to be able to talk about that research on that forum, and I'd love to go back and do more of it. Should incels be looked at from a mental health perspective?

So I think so, at least in part. So if people agree that incels are quote unquote a problem and that we should try to reduce the online misogynistic ideology...

And then my view is I don't really care how we do it. Let's just do it the best way and the most effective way. And so in order to figure out what that is, we have to entertain lots of different options. Now, what we did with our recent study was we try to predict in-cell harm. And harm is defined quite loosely as a combination of misogynistic beliefs, but condoning of violence and seeing feminism as the enemy.

Sorry, that was an ideology of aggression and aggressive tendency. So that's what we had for harm. And then we decided to see how we could predict that using a couple of different things. Now, my colleague, Joe Whittaker, who's a criminologist, he was really interested in the networking, how incels are talking to each other and whether that sort of ratchets things up and contributes to risk.

I was interested in mental health perspective primarily because I've taken a little bit of a left turn into that, particularly in male psychology. And of course we have Will Costello that your listeners will probably be very familiar with. And he's sort of knee deep constantly in in-cell ideology. And so we were able to run these three things kind of in parallel and say, well, which actually predicts harm the most? And we found something really interesting. So the first thing is they all predicted harm in,

in some degree. So it's not just one thing. And that's fantastic because it means that there's multiple avenues for intervention. So if we look at in-cell networking and reduce that, then the risk of harm might go down. But we also found that in-cell ideology and mental health was about twice the predictive strength of networking. So those things are bigger. So it doesn't mean don't attack the networking.

But it means that if you want good bang for your buck, looking at the mental health and the ideology might be a good way to do it. But then the most fascinating thing of all was statistically we found a relationship between mental health and ideology in a sort of bi-directional back and forth way. So what that basically means is that the worst in cells mental health was

the more into the ideology they were, but also the more they got into the ideology, the worse their mental health became. And so for me, because...

engaging with people about ideology and trying to change their beliefs about their ideology is notoriously difficult. It's one of the most difficult things you can do when it comes to modifying behavior. But mental health, we have a much better track record of doing something about that. And so what that study kind of implied to me is one avenue we could explore is looking at supporting mental health and

That in and of itself is probably a worthy goal because people are suffering with their mental health. They're humans. At the end of the day, you want to help people from that and stop them suffering. But it kind of implies that that might reduce the ideology along with it, in which case you've got an interesting way of getting at the issue. So absolutely, I think it's not something that we should take off the table, but it's controversial, right? So if you look at the

the research evidence on just re-offending. I'm not saying that incels are criminals, but if you look at the forensic literature and you look at re-offending among those who are imprisoned, it was a really interesting study out a couple of years ago that compared giving mental health support, generic mental health support to inmates versus sort of physical health support. And what they found is the inmates that you give physical health support to, re-offending went up

Whereas if you gave generic general mental health support to them, reoffending rates when they left went down. What's physical health support? So physical health would be just sort of encouraging exercise and mainly exercise intervention, to be honest. But what's interesting about that is that it doesn't gel well with the sort of public perception of why people should be in prison. So people should be in prison to suffer because they've done something wrong.

So the idea of going and giving mental health support to make people feel better in prison is not very palatable. And I see a similar thing going on with the in-cell thing, where there's a resistance about mental health because people are worried about, oh, that's just excusing the behavior. But also these are, quote unquote, really nasty guys who have terrible views. More on that later because there's huge variety within that community as I come to learn in private practice. Yeah.

It's like they've got terrible views, so they should be punished for that. So why the hell would you want to help them and help them feel better? When again, as I said, my view is I want to stop misogyny full stop and I want to stop suffering full stop. And so I don't care so much about how you get there as long as you get there.

It's interesting to think about, you know, the way that you framed that at the very beginning was if you think that there is sort of an incel problem, which contributes to some antisocial behavior, contributes to creating content on the internet that it would probably be best if there was less of. But...

maybe sort of beyond all of that there are humans inside of that that are suffering in some form or another and stepping in and intervening in that whether it comes from the mental health perspective or this sort of recursive feedback loop from ideology to that i have to imagine that the networking also furthers the entrenching into the ideology and the mental health problem so yeah i i

I understand what you mean, the in-cell problem, but it fills an awful lot like sour grapes at an existential level for guys to retreat into that and then make it their identity. I imagine if they were given a surefire route out of it that many of them would take it if only they could divorce themselves from the ideology. Yeah, and it's such a nitpick problem that the point is there isn't just the one route, right?

But yeah, you're 100% right. There's suffering there. I think the sour grapes is on the part of people looking in at that as a potential intervention. It kind of reminds me of the type of people where, you know, they...

they're upset because you haven't done something for them. You then do the thing for them, but they're still upset because you had to be asked. Do you know what I mean? So it's, it's like, it's stuff around the actual action rather than the action itself. It has that sort of, um, air about it. Um, why is sympathy so hard to come by for incels? So I think it's a mixture of things. So first and foremost, a lot of people's

insight into incel is based on stereotypes so it's based on what they get from the media very few people who even talk about incels have actually put in a lot of the legwork in terms of understanding the community and thinking deeply about it so if you think about the stereotype the stereotype is right-wing young male who isn't neat not in education employment or training who

who absolutely hates women and is indeed a threat to women. Some people actually take a step outside of that stereotype and start thinking about other things. Like I've attended talks about incels, and in that talk, people were using domestic violence rates

as evidence of incel harm, totally glossing over the fact that, well, you have to be part of it. Do you see what I mean? So it's almost like they fall into this very sort of system one fast thinking group of just bad men. Yeah, and I think people respond to that with that sort of visceral gut feeling just towards bad men who might do them harm.

It's also a lot easier to frame thinking around that. It's very easy to put people just all in the same box rather than thinking about things in a more nuanced way. It's interesting sort of trying to think about, you know, when you get outside of people that are researching this, this

lack of sympathy that really seems to come from both men and women. I think you can understand it in some ways from the women's perspective, because a lot of the content that's created, incels don't exactly have a fantastic brand when it comes to women, even if some of the incels within that would be perfectly nice and supportive of women. I know that they're more left-leaning on average. I know that they have autism rates at like

10 times that of the base rate of the population. So, you know, they're very, in many ways, deserving of the sympathy that women typically would give to a down and out man. But bad brand plus also bad behavior doesn't exactly encourage that. I was particularly interested in where the lack of sympathy comes from from other men.

And I kind of get the sense that maybe a zero sum game of competition, maybe some low key intrasexual competition for men, kind of the same way as the body positivity movement for women might be women encouraging their fatter female friends to continue to eat themselves out of the mating pool that,

guys who have sexual access to women encouraging neats and incels to ascend actually does create more competition within the mating domain and I think another one is just in a

meritocratic world where you're supposed to be the architect of your successes and your failures, being associated with anybody who hasn't done that is just, you know, you're just helping losers. Like, why should you do that? You know, the male desire for conquer and mastery and success and competence is so strong. I wonder if there's a kind of

ick or that's them over there they're broken they're deficient it's sort of this social social sexual leper type thing yeah i see what you're saying i actually think i think i disagree i think it's complete broke science pulled out of my house yeah so it's just it's just a notion

It's a good, who knows? It might be right. But my, what I suspect is that we need to look more about the setup. Yeah. Who incels are, how they interact with one another. Because, you know, when I was growing up, you'd have a group of friends who meet each other in real life. And maybe you'd have the one friend who's struggling and as you know, maybe they're a bit of a loser and stuff. And that's the optimal place to then take someone under your wing and help them. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, incels, by and large, go into these sort of pseudo-anonymous or anonymous forums where no one really knows each other, hiding behind usernames. And that's where they're spending their time. Like, I'm pretty sure when we looked at the average profile in our report, you know, some incels were spending like five, six hours a day in these forums. Now,

That means they're not leaving the house, they're not actually going out and touching grass, some might say, and they're not socializing in those more traditional ways that actually lends itself to social support. And that's not necessarily entirely their fault because there's some setup around the incel culture that drags people into that. And you mentioned before with autism, it's easier to talk online if maybe you struggle with your social skills. So I think there's some basic stuff around that.

On the idea of sympathy, though, you also get these little cultural things that only when you get more familiar with the community do you understand. It's what we'll normally call performative antagonism. So incels say, well, society rejects me, so I'm going to kind of lash out and say wild things that I don't necessarily believe to get a rise out of people. And in psychotherapy, actually, we would see this as a little bit of a cycle.

So it's kind of similar to perfectionism. So with perfectionists, if they feel like they can't accomplish something, they will just self-sabotage. And it's almost like a version of that, like I'll never be accepted by mainstream society. So I may as well self-sabotage. I may as well put something in the way that guarantees the result that I'll get rejected by people and they won't like me. Because I kind of think that that's going to happen anyway, but I can take a bit more control over it if I go first.

So I'll say something like, oh, you know, the, uh, this is one example I always use that I saw, oh, you know, one way to solve the mating crisis is we'll just have a village and in every village we'll have one girl who's chained up in the middle naked and guys can free use her and that will solve the problem. Now, when you talk to incels about these sorts of things and you scratch beneath the surface, they don't believe that sort of stuff for a second. They know it's a boron and it's specifically to get a rise out of people that

The problem is media then picks up on that, thinks it's straight, thinks they 100% believe that in the heart of hearts. And that then informs the stereotype that everyone else believes. And why would you have sympathy for someone who had a view like that if you thought that they were serious about it? Yeah, really great point. I saw that you got into a bit of a brouhaha recently with a few authors that took

issue with some of the stuff that you guys had written. Recent violent attacks by misogynist incels have catalyzed a flurry of research. In this essay, we critique scholarly approaches that attribute incel violence perpetuated, perpetrated by cisgender heterosexual men to poor mental health and loneliness. We argue that such approaches are

lack explanatory power and methodological rigor, validate misogynist incels' claims to victimhood, reflect undue sympathy for violent perpetrators, and obscure and legitimize incel violence. To address the limitations of the research that focuses on poor mental health and loneliness as the primary causes of incel violence, we recommend researchers incorporate feminist structural and intersectional approaches in their work and conceptualize misogynist incel ideology and violence as

as products of male supremacist culture and structure. What does that mean? It means that someone went to chat GPT and says, I don't like the idea that incels can explain away what they do with mental health, and I'm really into feminism. Craft for me an academic-sounding journal article, and then we'll publish it.

I'm saying that with tongue-in-cheek. Obviously, the authors care a lot about the incel problem. They care a lot about harm and violence against women. I do too. Most people do. But the way they go about it is just...

They're poo-pooing all of these alternative approaches and mental health approaches, but they don't even talk about psychology at all in the paper. I feel a bit bad because it feels almost a bit like punching down because it's essentially published by some sociologists who are a mixture of PhD and postdoc. But at the same time, science is science, and there shouldn't be an excuse for putting something out there.

that's just bad and not helping. There is also a if you start playing with fire dot dot dot kind of expectation. Yeah, and when I say bad, I just mean on like a logical fallacy front because I think on the tweet that I put out about this, I give an example of at least like 17 fallacies in there, including very close to the knucklehead homonym attacks in there, you know, questioning the sexuality of...

of incel researchers and saying that that gets in the way, criticizing the rigor of the theories that are being used while suggesting a pet theory that generally isn't very rigorous at all, leveraging a lot of claims that are unfalsifiable. It's just not very helpful. And what it ultimately is doing is it's poo-pooing, like I said at the start, one avenue that I think that we should explore

And if we're serious about sorting out this problem or helping people, we should explore all avenues. Is there a lot of incel violence? So it depends, right? So some people define violence as even if someone was to say something awful that makes someone feel bad.

Some people now take that as a definition of violence. Or if you take the perpetuation of misogynistic views as violence, then of course there's incel violence everywhere you look.

I my working definition of violence tends to go more to that sort of acting out physical so we're talking attacks so you're talking the the likes of Elliot Roger you're talking about the recent shooter in Plymouth in the UK that to me is that sort of acting out violence um if you look at that side of things actually compared to organized terrorist groups if you look at um

a group like Boko Haram, for example, the number of actual incel attacks is very, very small. And not only is it very small, but a lot of them, after the fact, there's a big question raised over whether...

uh, they're in cell motivated attacks at all. So Alec Manassian is the, the, the example that comes to mind where he actually put a social media post implying that it was an in cell attack and everyone treated it that way, obviously. But then after the fact, when you go and look, when it went through the court system and looked at the judge's verdict, verdict,

They basically conclude that that was a lie and that he wasn't inspired by that at all. So when you take some of those out, you're talking about very low double digit figures from a community where I think last time I went on the forum, there were 26,000 members, but that's just the people who use one forum predominantly from one country. And of course,

What other people don't realize is that incel is kind of an identity. It also just kind of describes reproductive status at a basic level. I'm not having sex, and I feel like that's outside of my control.

But you have some guys out there that I call incel adjacent. So they say, I'm not an incel, but they've got all of the same beliefs. And there's a lot of those guys out there as well. So you've potentially got hundreds of thousands of guys who either subscribe to this ideology or are very close to it who are doing a lot of harm online with what they're promoting.

And sometimes what they're doing, you know, like doxing people and which can ruin people's lives or modifying people's pictures to put clothes back on them. That can be very upsetting. I mean, it's, it's, you could argue it's not as bad as the other way around, but it still sort of feels, can feel like a personal attack. But I never put those things in the same ballpark as someone who, you know,

has shot you or stabbed you or crossed that line into physics of violence. This is one of the problems with talking about incel violence. When most people think about the word violence, especially if you have it going after the word incel, what you think is Elliot Rodger. You think mass school shooter, you think kinetic, some form of

big incident that is really, really not good. That's not to say that manipulating people's photos and doxing them online is nothing, but I do think that the term violence conjures up on average a more

aggressive, more impactful issue than what it is mostly. I mean, just for clarity at the moment, David and William have got a pre-print journal, a bit of analysis that they're doing, which is literally titled, Why Isn't There More Incel Violence? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that's published now. So people should be able to access that. Yeah.

And yes, there's this idea that actually maybe we should be expecting more given the numbers and things getting in the way, like the fact that incels do a lot of talking online in those sort of pseudonymous communities. So we talked a lot about this in the paper with regards to networking, the paper that we did for the Home Office. If you look at the types of organizations...

that do a lot of physical violence. They have an ideology and they have an ideology with an end goal. So they have a specific goal that they want to realize and cells don't have that. But there's also a lot of small group talking, in-person planning and hallmarks of

big large-scale attacks that's kind of missing from the incel community which is one of the reasons like they're not particularly organized well is it even right to refer to it as the incel community are they a cohesive movement with a central goal um so i'm not sure whether that's the definition of

Community. So I would say that they are a community. I would say that they're a community, even though it fragments. So you have some on Discord, some on the forums. They're a community in the sense that they know each other. They come together to talk. People feel like they have an element of social support from it. So I would say, yes, that you could count that as a community. What I would actually put the question mark over is that ideology. Is it an ideology? Is it a movement?

That's where the lines get a bit hazy because compared to other threatening movements, they don't have the same hallmarks. What's 'hempathy'? I saw you cite that. I'd never heard of that word before. Oh, so that...

So that's one of those terms that's thrown around like toxic masculinity in the paper. I'll be honest that with the, so this is referring to the paper, which we've now written in rebuttal to the one that we talked about earlier.

And what's really cool about that is we've gone together some of the top scholars, including a woman of color, by the way, to craft a response to that article. It's actually longer than the original article, pointing out all the flaws and justifying why a mental health lens might be good to...

at least entertain with this. And part of the article, we kind of attack the fact that the authors use these kind of nebulous terms like toxic masculinity, like empathy to sort of downplay the suffering of men and demonize some stereotypically male behavior. I don't have too much more to say about empathy, if I'm honest, because that's a part of the paper which wasn't my MO. But one thing's for certain, it doesn't help

There's a lot of terminology in this debate that isn't helpful. Some of it is through imprecision. So like we were talking about violence earlier, right? So if you're going to lump everything in as violence, from shooting someone to name-calling online, then the opportunities to reduce violence kind of reduce or become less effective because you're not being specific enough in the behaviors that you're targeting.

Similarly, I think in a lot of this discourse, things like empathy, things like toxic masculinity, they're very nebulous terms that kind of get in the way and turn the discourse really into a word salad. But they're all fancy ways of saying men can't possibly suffer because men historically have been the repressors and not the repressed. There's a lot of that in the article. One of my favorite articles,

One of my, say, favorite, one of the bits that really got my back up was the argument that even if men suffer with their mental health, it doesn't really matter because there are other groups that suffer with their mental health more. Zero-sum view of empathy. Zero-sum view of empathy, exactly. And zero-sum view of mental health support.

So, you know, your mental health can be through the floor. You could be having suicidal thoughts every other day. But as long as there's another group that might be having suicidal thoughts every day, you don't matter. You're fine. You may as well be absolutely fine and okay. I think as well, when you layer on top the bad people shouldn't get support label, this is a real sort of one-two slam dunk.

Yeah, bad people shouldn't get support. And that just gets in the way because sometimes giving the support turns bad people into not so bad people. What happens if you view and label incels as violent monsters? What happens? That's such a good question. It depends on the person, I think. So incels...

What we do know in cells by and large is that they're high on rejection sensitivity. That's one of the things that we found. And they're also high on victimhood, rightly or wrongly. They perceive society as not liking them. They perceive society as not empathizing with them. And they're worried about putting themselves out there in society out of fear of getting rejected. And that's not just in romantic relationships.

And so when you refer to them that way, you're just going to be feeding into the problem and validating that. It's strong evidence. I use this analogy with Will the other day, actually. Sometimes talking to these guys, it reminds me of some of those cults.

Shows you see on Netflix where you've got a massive family in a house in Utah somewhere who are all holding up, talking about the fact that the outside world is so awful and all the enemies are out there and we have to stay inside and protect ourselves. Very isolating. And I feel like the in-self forums sometimes can...

can have the similar thing where you get together, they swap the worst examples of the outside world. Everyone convinces each other that if you go outside and talk to a woman, you're going to be thrown in jail. Um,

And so they stay inside. So whenever you get that sort of labeling effect, you're bad, you're awful, you're a monster, it's just going to be fuel for that fire and keep the wheels spinning. Obviously, it's a really, going back to the sympathy, empathy conversation, that's a very difficult cycle to step in to. Because if you're a person who isn't in there, you've got this group of guys that are saying things that are a combination of shitposting and genuine resentment. They are...

are finding unrepresentative and edge cases, and sometimes even middle-of-the-bell-curve cases, but using those to be the entirety of all of experience outside. And then when you do try and step in, they fight the case on the other side as aggressively as possible to hold on to the ideology. And you go, hey, I can't be bothered. I can't be bothered to do... You know, it's the whole, if you want to help yourself, how do you expect anybody else to help you as well? You know, it's this...

It's a very robust outer shell, defensive outer shell that is difficult to penetrate and painful and arduous and probably pretty frustrating in order to be able to try and break apart. It's largely unfalsifiable. So yeah, again, you can say all that you want. And I do like that men and women that are struggling should be given a fucking ton of sympathy. I think that men in particular are given far less sympathy. The gamma bias really is very true. Yeah.

And in the same sentence, I can understand why it's so hard for somebody to go through the fucking fire and brimstone. Let me grab my flaming sword. I'm going to cut this apart. Yeah. And there are some cultural artifacts about the community, little things that have popped up that only happen in the incel community. It doesn't happen elsewhere.

that also really feeds into that, hardens up that shell. So I've been doing a lot of talks for mental health professionals and talking about this with people who might be practicing CBT, people who are used to dealing with beliefs and softening beliefs. And there are some aspects of the incel community that are essentially reverse CBT. So if you take coping, for example,

Now, if I get a depressed patient, if a depressed patient comes into a clinic, their thinking will be very hard. Hard thinking means, which like all or nothing, catastrophizing, hard thinking equals poor mental health equals suffering, right? And so what we do with people who are depressed and what we do with people who are anxious is we soften the thinking. We take it from black and white to gray, okay? Now, in the incel community, you have this idea of cope,

right? And cope by its own definition, even if you go to the Black Pill wiki and look up the page on cope, it gives a couple of examples there. And it's essentially encouraging each other to harden up your thinking. So the moment you start to get a bit flexible and think, oh, maybe I was rejected, but maybe it's because of this reason or that reason. They're like, nope, it's not because of that. You're coping. It's because you're ugly. It's because it's over for you. You may as well give in.

So they're actually encouraging hardening of thinking. So it's reverse CBT in that way.

And the other thing that's quite interesting, one of-- so I've done a lot of qualitative incel interviews about their journey trying to engage with mental health services, which has been fascinating and really eye-opening about the diversity in the community. Everything from very left-leaning incels with lots of female friends who would never hurt a fly all the way through to sort of regular prostitute users who have been doing drug dealing, like massive, massive scope.

And one of them introduced me to the idea of crabs in a bucket. Have you heard of that? Yeah. So for the listeners who haven't heard of it, so if you get a load of crabs in a bucket and they're alive, they'll start scaling the sides. And the moment one gets to the top,

they get pulled back down from the others who are also trying to escape. And you get a lot of that in the community as well. The moment there's a little glimmer of hope, people are either ejected from the community or they're talked back into the hopelessness to stay in it. So it's like crabs pulling each other back into the bucket, back deeper into the community. And so you get those little things that perpetuate the problem that feel like they're less about the individual and more about the setup. How ethnically and politically diverse

are these groups? What's it like inside of the, because from the outside, a lot of it is, you know, the usual suspect. It's white supremacy. It's right-wing culture. It's misogyny. It's toxic masculinity. It's school shooters. How true is that? We've been myth-busting quite a few of those now for a number of years. We've replicated some of this work quite a bit. And we tend to find that about a third, and this is consistent in the UK and the US, by the way, about a third

are BIPOC or just non-white, if you want to describe it that way. So that's straight away, you know, if they're a white supremacist movement, they're allowing a lot of non-white members in. So that kind of

again raises questions about that in terms of young you know we get huge standard deviations you have guys who are in selling their 50s and 60s you get somewhere 18 or 90 I think in most of our samples we end up getting about 26 something like that so they're not necessarily young we recently took um

The Pew Center has a political ideology measure that we pinched, which is quite interesting because what it does, it gives you the left-wing statement of something and the right-wing statement says, pick which one you agree with most.

So it might be, you know, government can do a lot more to help the poor versus the poor should get minimal funding and stand on their own two feet, something like that. And people could pick everything from environmental policy to gay marriage to there's articles about helping out ethnic minorities, etc.

When you present that to incels, what we actually find is they're picking the left-wing statement more than 50% of the time overall. So they're actually generally quite centrist, and they describe themselves as politically centrist as well, and maybe slightly left-leaning. And that makes...

Perfect sense, by the way, because if you think about it, it's people who tend to have very little low status, low money, who tend to be very pro left-wing policies. So that kind of makes sense. They do tend to be a bit more right-wing on certain elements. I can't remember exactly what they are, but nothing that jumps out as obvious. What you do find, though, is that if you isolate the small proportion of incels who are like, yes, violence in the name of incel is often justified, and

Which I think in our sample is like 6% to 10%, something like that. Those tend to have quite right-wing views, so they'll pick the right-wing statement for everything. So it's almost like you've got this community and then within you've got little subgroups. And one of those subgroups

is riskier than the others, and that tends to be categorized by right-leaning ideology. What about the views on violence and sexual entitlement? Is that universal across incels? So again, no, it's not. That's the simple, straightforward answer. People will like to take a mean,

and just generalize it across everyone and say, well, that's the typical and the typical is universal. But even if you take something like rate myth acceptance, even if you take something like

um, sexism, benevolent or hostile sexism, you will find people at both ends of the pole. And so you can, it's, it's very easy to potentially overgeneralize. And that's not saying that there aren't some nasty pasties in, uh, in incels and that there aren't more nasty pasties than you might get if you get a similar sample of the general population.

But we have to remember that within that, you've got a lot of different voices with a lot of different views. What binds them together is that extremely dark, hopeless experience over their relationship prospects. And that manifests itself in a lot of different ways. A lot of incels that I know...

almost use the insult forums like a little bit of escapism porn type thing. So they're feeling bad about themselves. They're feeling bad about the lack of relationship prospects. They just want to go to a place and get that message that reinforces how they're feeling.

um without necessarily that informing their opinion of women at least in the short term anyway uh and this is something that's quite common i mean if you see people who have depression and you get them to take the phone out of their pocket and go on tiktok and start swiping their content that they see the algorithm will be feeding them the sad stuff it reflects it's almost like a mirror

And so I think a lot of the in-cell forums act like a mirror for some individuals who aren't creating the content, aren't engaging with other users, just feel sad and want to know there are others who feel like them.

What do you think about the accusation that your industry of evolutionary psychology has a body count associated with their neglect of the incel topic? Yeah, so that's been a point of contention. So this was Daniel Connery Bean's article in the Boston Globe that cited that. And I know Dan fairly well, and he is a nice guy, and I know that with that article that a lot was left on the chopping room floor. I think...

Myself and Steve Stewart-Williams have been arguing for years that there is a lot of sloppy communication in evolutionary psychology, particularly around sex differences, where people, because they're writing not for the public, they're writing for other academics and they're writing specifically for evolutionary psychologists.

They will sometimes cut corners knowing that people will fill in the corners at the other end. So not everyone spells out the full evolutionary logic of their ideas. Sometimes people, because even researchers are human, will slip into that thing of taking an average difference and saying, well, men do this and women do that, when it's not. Men typically do this, women typically do that. And so...

There's through sloppy writing and not recognizing who we're actually writing for, which with open access journals, with preprints, is becoming more and more public. You only have to look at the Black Pill Wiki and go to the Black Pill Science section. There's over 200

peer-reviewed articles there with commentary. It's being digested by these communities. And so I think we have some responsibility to bear that in mind when we're writing and tighten that up and do it properly.

At the same time, to then say that there's a body count associated with that, I'm not so sure. Because again, there's a lot of cherry picking of evidence that's done by the community. So they will find a way of finding some evidence that backs up what they're saying and ignore the evidence that runs counter to that.

And a point that kind of applies to this stuff, but I've made it about other things as well. If you've got an individual...

who the the difference between the the thing that makes them commit an act of violence is some evolutionary psychology research that they've read you have someone who is very close to violence already who already has that disposition and has just found something that can be used as a reason that's my argument um i don't think there's anyone who's going from zero to

to 100 through the reading of evolutionary psychology. And so then giving the ultimate responsibility, saying that there's a body count associated with that, I think is incredibly far-fetched. And unfortunately, what it also does is it kind of diminishes the efforts of people like Jeffrey Miller. It diminishes the efforts of people like Will and myself who actually try to correct that

and try to push back and encourage an accurate way of viewing that research when applied to real world mating. What's this drama online about you guys being paid by some shadowy anti-extremist task force? I really, it's, this stuff just really annoys me because there are certain things in life

Being sexist and being racist are two really good examples where you can just levy stuff at someone. Like if you call someone a sexist, the burden of proof instantly shifts to the person who's being accused, right? And this is one of those things where someone comes up with a complete crazy theory and just everyone is like, oh, well, you need to disprove that. It's like, well...

What do you want me to do, man? I'm a university lecturer in the UK who's not paid...

loads and loads and loads of money. If I was to do something shadowy like that and break the sort of ethical code of the British Psychological Society, I'd just lose my job and my livelihood. Like, why would I do that? Plus, I think a lot of people with that particular research, because it was funded by the Centre for Countering Extremism, which is an arm's length body of the Home Office in the UK.

Arms length means that they're not sort of dictated to by the Home Office. They can do their own thing. So there's the first layer of it not being to do with government. The second layer was then that we had it in black and white that they were to have no impact whatsoever.

over the actual study that we did. They didn't even get access to the data or anything like that. We kept all of that private. And so, and I even feel bad now that I'm kind of justifying it, but it's just laughable, the amount of safeguards that you go through. And bear in mind, right, the thing that really upsets me about this is a good example of you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't, right? For that study, we paid in sales.

Okay. To the best of my knowledge, we're the only study ever to pay in sales. And that was me, right? That was only on my shoulders because I was like, at the end of the day, these people are people.

And you normally pay people for doing psychology studies and we should treat them like people like anyone else and pay them accordingly like we would anyone else. Bearing in mind that we know within that community that you've got diverse voices and you're not always paying someone for being an extreme misogynist.

I took so much flack for that from both camps. I took so much flack from the people who weren't in cell, who were like, oh, we don't want you paying them. And I took flack from the incels themselves who were like, oh, you know, you're just selling all my personal data and this is a friend and stuff like that. So damned if you do, damned if you don't. But there's,

any anything like that i just block it and just get on with it because um i think that people like myself will have got a good enough track record now that people know that we call it how it is right so our thing has always been if you say something misogynistic we will tell people exactly what you've said and we'll say this this is the tendency we won't oversell it we won't undersell it we won't say we

support it. We will just describe it as it is with an idea of trying to reduce harm. That's where we sit. And there's a lot of incels who personally disagree with my perspective on that and that of my colleagues, but at least they know where we stand with things and they know that we generally call it as it is. Sorry, that was a rant there. You got my back up. That's exactly why I'm here. What haven't we covered today?

from the sort of current state of in-cell research, new insights that you've been getting from that? What are we missing? So we're missing a couple of things. We're missing a couple of things.

So the first thing that we're missing is everyone's still trying to describe stuff, right? So incel research has exploded, but it's still a load of people scraping forums. I mean, you went to the Evolution and Human Behavior Conference a year ago, a couple of years ago in Palm Springs. There were loads of incel talks. They have very little data. Lots of theory, lots of scraping of forums, not actually going and talking to these guys and finding out what they believe.

Now people are doing that. That's up and running, but it's still in the descriptive. What we're missing is that move into doing something about it.

Right? And this is why we're going down the mental health route. It's not to excuse anything about saying, right, we've described that now. We know there's some harm here. There's some self-harm within the community. There's some harm directed outwards as well. But we also know that there are subgroups. So the first thing is how do we categorize the subgroups? Because they may need different things. And then secondly, how do we actually try to intervene? And that's what we're trying to work towards now.

So I've already talked a little bit about subgroupings with the small condoning of violence, hiding right wing. What you might find that's super interesting, we've got this as a preprint at the moment. We dug into the data internally.

in the home office, well, the CCE paper in more depth. And we found what we think are two statistical clusters of different types of incels or different pathways towards harm. So on the one side, you have high autism traits, low mate value, bullying. That's kind of like one cluster.

And then on the other side, you have dark triad right-wing beliefs. And they both feed into the ideology, but they don't seem to touch one another. So you've got almost like these two different types within the same community being labeled the same. Now, of course, how you would help someone with poor social skills who's been bullied, who maybe hates women because they feel like they've been hated on themselves,

How you would address that would be completely different to someone who is right-wing ideology and highly narcissistic and has psychopathy. So at just a beginning stage, and to be honest, the reason I love that is when you talk to the NHS in the UK, they say to you, this feels more like a prevent issue. This feels more like counterterrorism because some of these guys are really right-wing and high dark triad. This doesn't feel like healthcare.

And then you go and talk to Prevent and they say, we see so many of these guys who wouldn't hurt to fly. They've just got really poor social skills. This feels like an NHS issue. And this is why I think it is, is because we've got these clusters. So we need to identify the clusters, identify the needs, and then try to do something about it in terms of helping. And I don't know anyone apart from our team that's trying to actively do that and do that in good faith.

It's a problem with taxonomies of anything, right? As soon as you create a label, people get lumped into that label. Yeah. It covers all manner of sins and behaviors. And I suppose that because everything is so new, this still needs to be broken apart. Yeah, people are kind of scrambling around. It's almost like, imagine trying to, imagine taking football hooligans, organized football hooligans, and generalizing that to football fans.

when everyone's studying football fans, when actually there's this particular corner that we really need to get into and the others are kind of along for the ride. Is there anything interesting happening with the state of...

sort of misogyny, misogyny research outside of the incel world at the moment. You know, we've got a lot of shifting dynamics happening in the modern world with women outperforming men in education and employment, with poor mental health for men, with increasing levels of depression, of self-harm, of male sedation hypothesis, my thing. And

I'm wondering whether we're seeing changing rates of anti-female viewpoints outside of the self-identified incel movement. Yeah, well, the bigger movement is the wider red pill manosphere, which is what you're essentially alluding to. And if you're worried about risk of harm...

I actually wonder whether it's, and particularly if you want to go down this route of the harm that you care about being perpetuation of misogyny. I've been more worried about red pill manosphere communities because the main difference is that

incels have taken the red pill and the red pill in relation to uh to feminism but where the the manosphere communities by and large use that to inform some sort of action incels are using it to form some sort of inaction right so the red pill is that men are hard done by there's a broken mating market uh

Women want one thing when they say they want another. Society says it's personality that matters, but it isn't. People wake up and they get this knowledge in their head. What insults do is they go, well, if that's the real game, I can't play that. I can't keep up with that at all. So I will opt out and I'll get hopeless about it. And that will go and fester over here.

On the other side, you've got people saying, well, I'll use that to my advantage then. Maybe I'll opt out of mating altogether, the sort of men go their own way community, or I'll try to game the system, pick apart this community. But what they all have in common is it's actually doing something with that knowledge, using that to change how you approach life and how to actually then engage with women or by and large anyway. So I think people have been focusing a lot on insults

This is a catchy term. It's more well-defined out of those different communities. But I think really we need to be broadening it to what I call online misogynistic ideology and looking beyond that. Omi, I call it. Omi, interesting. I wonder about that. I'm going to try and say this in the most delicate way possible. I think the...

sort of cabin fever, social awkwardness, basically the stasis in the real world in terms of actually getting stuff done, getting up on time, being able to go and make things happen in your life, that much of the incel movement perpetuates or causes or increases is in some ways helping to mitigate some of the violence that we could see.

that the fact that it is encouraging people to stay in the house, don't go outside. I mean, if you're not going to speak to a woman because you're terrified of talking to her, you need to be a very unique brand of human to overcome that and go straight to punching somebody in the face or worse. Yeah, yeah. So when it comes to the they go out and do things thing, I would guess that people...

people who are in this online misogyny ecosystem, infrastructure, whatever your term is, or me, that they would be more likely to go and do that. The difference being that those people

probably have a wider support group. They probably have friends. They probably have pursuits. If they're able to get out of the house and go and do things, maybe they're gainfully employed. Maybe they've got hobbies. I think that that acts as a bit of a bulwark against them. I don't know of any red pill killings. I haven't seen that come up. I imagine actually...

saying that it would probably be identified as incel because they'd say look at this stuff this sort of female hating content that they're sharing despite the fact that they didn't identify as that just another point fascinating to think about the similarities between uh migtao and incels men going their own way i chose to do it incels i didn't choose to do it but after a while if the

in cell ideology, if part of that canon is you shouldn't speak to a woman in case you go to jail. Oh, right. I'm not going to speak to a woman. How involuntary is it now? It's like predictively involuntary because you say, well, I've tried it before or I know I know what they actually want. I'm able to

predict this trajectory out there. But you go, well, the MGTOW and the in-cell people end up being perilously close together. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, it does make sense. And again, you see a lot of this in the therapy space because people, it's about the evidence that people are using.

So if you're out in the field and you're talking to people and you're getting feedback, that gives you a more accurate idea of what's going on. But if you're not doing that and you're getting an impression of rejection from the worst examples that are constantly being fed to you,

You're never experiencing rejection yourself. You've kind of internalized it. Now, if I went to a nightclub, not that I would, I could ask out 100 women in an evening and maybe I'll get rejected 100 times knowing me, right? I've experienced it 100 rounds of rejection. The moment you internalize rejection, you're only limited in how often you're getting rejected by the speed of your own thoughts. So you could potentially be rejecting yourself hundreds of times a second.

And I think it's very easy to fall into that loop. And of course, what do we do with people who reject us? What do we do with people we think are going to reject us just in life, right? Do we like them? Do we think they're great? Do we want to help them out? No, by and large, the human reaction to people who reject us is I don't like you very much.

And so this thing compounds and goes over and over and over. And the way that I think you have to break that cycle is you have to get the reality check in there, first and foremost. So is the data accurate? Let's not be around the bush. There will be some men out there who they feel like they have no meeting prospects, and they're right, 100%. Let's not pretend that people like that don't exist.

But if you do, then the root is around acceptance. The root is about acceptance and thinking, well, what are you going to do with your life that isn't bound up in this frustration and this grieving process? But for a lot of people, I can't tell you the number of interviews with incels and clients I've had as incels. And I've sat across someone who is more attractive than I am, objectively.

who are opting out of the mating market purely because of their physical looks. So I think that there's a data problem here. There's a data problem in terms of not having access to it, making a load of assumptions that are never challenged and only ever reinforced by the community. What have you learned about men's experience with female therapists?

So I've learned a lot about therapy in general. Now, in the UK, I don't know about your experience. You probably have all singing, all dancing healthcare now. In the UK, it's quite common now that you have, say, a GP practice. And every time you go there, you see a different GP. The days of the family doctor have gone.

And what you learn when you see a different GP every time is you realize that there's a lot of variation in quality of GPs and there's some crap ones. The quality in therapists and the variability in therapists is a hundredfold larger than that. Chris, could you just say for me a second, I'm a counselor.

Yes. No, no, no. You personally say I am a counselor. You are a counselor. No, no, no. Say you say I, Chris, I'm a counselor. I am a counselor. There we are in the UK. You're now a counselor. It's an unregulated. It's like life coach. In the UK. Exactly. Anyone could set up shop as a counselor. You just made me change career. There we go. Instantly. Don't you feel better? Don't you feel better? I do. Thank you.

Now, there are accreditation bodies, but there are people out there practicing with no education. There's people out there practicing with no accreditation.

And even those who have accreditation, there's huge variation in education levels. And so I just want to kind of frame that because I will talk about the experiences of some of the clients that I've had come to me and what they've said they've had. But I kind of want to put that on a backdrop of there's a lot of crap therapists out there. And really a message to your viewers as well. If...

someone has only gone and seen a therapist once and had a bad experience, don't write off therapy. Just write off that person and go to the next one because chances are it will be different next time. Now, the other problem is that most counselors and therapists in the UK are women. So if you're going to have a bad experience with a counselor, chances are it's going to be a woman because there's more of them.

That being said, when I have clients come to me and say, I've had a really bad experience, most of my clients are male and they do say certain things about their experiences with female counselors.

that I can't say is a pattern, but it is something that I see quite regularly. So one that comes up from time and time again is if I've seen men who have been in relationships that have been seen by a female counselor in couples therapy, there's a huge perception that the female counselor has sided with the female partner and sort of doubled up and double teamed on the guy. So you get a lot of that.

But you also get common complaints about lack of empathy, particularly within...

mating contexts. So female therapists report supposedly being unable to empathize with the male client over the fact that they're struggling to get a relationship. I've met people, for example, who have lots of female friends. They're very distressed because their female friends tell them, you're an amazing person. It's only a matter of time for you, even though it's never happened.

And they've gone to the female therapist who said the exact same thing. And then they felt like everyone around me is saying that I should be fine. I'm not. What's wrong with me? So you get elements of that. But then the real kicker, the real kick in the teeth is,

is that you get a lot of ideology entering the therapy space. So I've had lots of clients talking about how they've been told that their problem is due to their toxic masculinity, that their problem is due to them being narcissistic, to their problem being that they haven't, they don't engage with feminist ideology. And really, in therapy, that's a complete no-no. And so actually, a lot of my guys that I've seen, like,

I've seen conservative guys and Christian guys, guys from working class backgrounds, all of which were like, I can't gel with my therapist because I don't think that they will empathize with me. Now, what's really interesting about that is that there's no real evidence in the counseling and psychotherapy literature that the qualities of the counselor actually matter. So you see a lot of this in alcohol and substance misuse, right? So a lot of clients will say,

I only want a counselor if they've been an alcoholic themselves, because only then will they understand me. Which, from a human perspective, makes total sense. But the literature actually shows that if they don't know the status of whether the therapist was an alcoholic earlier in their life or not, it makes no real difference.

And similarly, it doesn't have to be this way. You know, guys who stick with female therapists, providing they're not bringing the ideology into the therapy space, providing they are empathizing, should have decent outcomes. So part of it is a perception from the clients themselves. They can't possibly empathize with me, so they won't. But part of it, in the worst examples, is that ideology entering into the therapy space.

That's pretty disheartening, I guess. And I imagine just causes more men to think that therapy isn't for them or that there are an unfixable problem or to sort of discount mental health interventions overall. Yes. And this is the problem because you've got a sex which by and large is constantly being told you're not opening up and they see opening up as a sign of weakness.

And then when they finally do get the, they're brave enough to start doing that, it kind of backfires. Well, their experience is invalidated. I know that you might be feeling this, but that's because of dot, dot, dot. Precisely, yeah. And invalidation is the bread and butter of counseling. It's that working relationship.

built on mutual trust and understanding that gets you places. And it's really like sometimes I find, so a lot of guys seek me out because of Twitter and stuff like that on my work.

Um, sometimes I find it really upsetting because I've worked with a lot of women as well. I have really great success in, in counseling. And the difference to me from my perspective of male clients and female clients is that the female clients come to have a conversation with me that they can't have with their friends and family. Men come to have a conversation with me that they can't have with anyone.

And I find that so upsetting because sometimes I'll be sat there and I'm like, you're having the type of conversation that one of my female clients would just be having with their mom or just having with their best friend.

And you feel like you can't have that and you can't open up to your friends about that. And so you've got to come and have professional mental health services in order to feel safe enough to open up with that. I've heard a number of seen comments online. You know, as soon as you start to talk about vulnerability, about emotional openness for men, there are.

There's many levels of hell. There are many sort of circles that you can descend through from you can't cry in front of your girlfriend to you should never tell her if you're upset to you should never tell her the way that you're feeling to you should never talk to your friends or cry in front of your friends, never tell your friends how you're feeling because they're going to leave you. You know, there's this massive, massive gap.

fear of abandonment by the world that men have that if i'm not always stoic and strong in control mastery competent admirable that the world is going to abandon me and uh i i get that the people may have had and there very well are lots of people out there for whom

these sort of friendships of convenience or of entertainment or whatever where as soon as you stop being a fun hang i'm gonna go and just spend time with somebody who's better but uh that's disheartening it's disheartening to me to think because it's evident if these people have that reaction it's evident that there is a part of them that thinks about opening up you know now

Now we start to see a parallel with what goes on in the incel movement with it's about the data that people are getting. Because again, you see worst case scenarios shared online.

So you can go on to X and people sharing cases where they cried in front. So what was one I saw the other day, like a Reddit post or something like that, where a guy and a girl were watching a horror film and he got scared for once when he's not normally scared in the horror films and they broke up a week later. That's like drip, drip, drip a message. Don't engage with mental health. Don't show how you're feeling. Now, the reality is if you've picked a half decent partner, and this is where people should be really selective in the partners that they choose,

Um, that is half the battle, but also I can't tell you the number of male clients I've had that when, when they, they see me and they say, ah, I can be vulnerable around another guy and the world doesn't end. And it was kind of okay.

but that was in a therapy setting. I'll try it with one of my friends. The moment they do that, the number of times where they collectively have the, oh, thank God for that because now I can talk about how I'm feeling as well. And it turns into a constructive conversation where everyone's been a little bit vulnerable with each other

It's like a Mexican standoff. So everyone's been vulnerable a little bit. So everyone's got something on the other person and it's fine. And people can just get it out there and find out that it doesn't blow up in your face all the time. Well, I think if you're the sort of person who wants to talk about the way that they're feeling, which is someone who thinks about it and is probably most people, yeah.

and you're around people who don't allow you to behave in that way, you don't have friends, you have acquaintances. Those aren't the people for you. And I'm aware you went to school with them, you drink in the same pub as them, you work in the same cubicle as them.

They suck. Maybe they don't suck for everybody, but they suck for you. They're not built for you. And I remember when I first started learning to fight and the big, the biggest lesson that somebody who is a complete noob boxer that becomes a novice boxer learns is that when you get punched in the face, you don't shatter.

And you'll see that people wince. There's this response. They wince when the fist is coming toward them. And then you see professional fighters, guys like Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor, who will watch a fist come and

brush the tip of their nose and then use that as the opportunity to respond so i think it's kind of the same i think about it emotionally the same as that learning that you're not made of glass learning that the world won't reject you if this is the case and defaulting to it's not a me problem if the people that i speak to about emotions can't handle it it's a them problem yeah and to to

Talk about a parallel. This is one of the things that people don't really expect from the outset if they go through a rehabilitation process with alcohol. Because if you've been addicted to alcohol and you get cleaned up and you want to stay sober, you have to get rid of your friend group. You instantly lose all of your friends around you because there tends to be a friendship group built on going out and getting drunk.

That's the only thing that you have in common. And so you have to sort of take that away to give yourself the social setting that's most optimal for your recovery.

And maybe there's a parallel here. You know, what tweaks can you make in your social circle to best optimize your mental health? And don't get me wrong. There are some people out there who are naturally stoic. And for people who are naturally stoic who aren't, you know, the idea that people repress things is a bit bogus, you know, encouraging people who are happily stoic.

to express all of these emotions because if they don't do it, it's wrong, is kind of backwards. And maybe that says something about the gender and the emotional intelligence and the emotional capacity of people who build a career in therapy. By and large, there's a lot of people who are quite happily stoic. That's fine. But if you're the type of person where you feel like you really do want to open up and share things,

and feel better that way, and you feel unable to do it, then I think you're right. Looking at a change would be a good idea. What's this new stuff on how income and population density affects family size? Oh, that's interesting. I'm calling that the Musk effect. Tagging Elon Musk, hoping that that would get picked up and retweeted, and then I would be able to make an income on Twitter with my millions of followers.

So a co-author of mine, Peter Jonasson, managed to get the dating website service to give us some data. And we managed to get it from this company that basically owns a whole bunch of dating websites all over the world. And some of them quite niche, like Jewish dating and uniform dating and that sort of thing.

In this dataset, we've got about 4 million dating profiles with characteristics about the people, but also things like how often are they getting messages and likes from other people and stuff like that. So we did one paper, which was about interest, like who's getting interest on dating websites, where we showed that a combination of income and occupation predicted that people got more hits, particularly if they were male.

And this follow-up paper, we thought, oh, we've got a data set here of 4 million people. We know where they're from. We know the states. We know the countries. And we also know how many kids they've got. Can we predict who's having kids? And what we basically found is that, I mean, there's a bit of a no-brainer in some respects that if you've got a lot of money,

it's easier to provide for more kids. And so generally speaking, income predicts greater number of children. I know that you can probably find some counter examples of that from your networks and people you know in your life of those who maybe are on social security, you have big families, but by and large, the more you have, the constraints, the number of kids you have gets reduced.

But there's also something else going on where it's people in cities, by and large, who are having smaller numbers of kids. And we believe there's a reason consistent with evolutionary theory for that, which is that when you have a dense population, when you're shoulder to shoulder with people, when you can't get a dentist because they're four, when you can't get into a GP surgery, when you go to Tesco's and it's Black Friday and there's everyone around,

When you're in that sort of environment, you're getting this signal that resources are tight. Space is a premium. Resources are a premium. And so in that case, it might be a better strategy

to put all of your eggs in one basket and have a smaller number of children that you know that you can provide for and really help and support rather than having lots in a very sort of dense environment that are going to struggle to sort of thrive. And then in the study, what we found

was that if you look at the population densities of the countries and the states from the participants and looked at their income and put these in a model, that yes, you find those two predictors. So people who have more income, they tend to have more kids, but there's also this thing of if they're in really packed, dense cities,

then they tend to have fewer kids. But then what's really interesting is you get an interaction. So if you're in, I do this now for an interaction. I don't know. I don't know why. It's like I'm a Power Ranger. So what you find is in the really highly densely populated areas,

that income kind of counteracts the population density effect. So what that means is, yes, you're in a situation where there's lots of people around. They could be competing for space. They could be competing for resources. But if you've got the money, you can care less about that sort of stuff.

And so have, again, more kids relative to that. So the reason I called it the Musk effect, I could have called it the Boris Johnson effect if I wanted to as well, is you can think about these guys who were raised in cities rather than out on the outskirts in farms who have those very large families and also have the very large income to boot.

Now, what's really cool about that study is that if you're thinking about implications, what to do with that information, well, there are certain things that you can do to give the impression that a city or an area is less dense than you might think it is.

This is going to sound like a really, really weird example. Are you about to say that you can fix the birth rate collapse by getting nicer walkways and putting more trains up in the city? Yeah, this is the idea. This is the idea. You could have the 15-minute cities and stuff like that. The cringe example I was going to say actually is that – don't ask me why I know this, but I've been planning to take a cruise in a couple of years' time.

And there's this one cruise line where I know the ships are identical and the capacity is identical, but the configuration is different. And you get complaints on all of the reviews of the one ship saying it's too dense. It feels like everyone's on top of each other and stuff like that. And on the other one, you don't, even though same amount of people, same size ship.

different configuration. So it is pointing at, could there be these little tweaks that if we're worried about population decline, or maybe the best thing to do isn't shove everyone in a city, or if you are going to shove everyone into a city, can you make it feel like it's a little bit more spaced out and roomy? I asked Stephen J. Shaw, probably

the best population birth rate researcher that I know. I asked him what's going to happen as populations start to decline. Let's take America, for instance. There's not exactly a shortage of space out here. And I said, okay, so let's say that we go from 330 million to 150 million. We're going to get chopped in half. Let's say it's going to happen over the next, I don't know, 150 years, something like that.

Are we going to see half full school classes? Are we going to see towns that every other shop or every other house is going to be empty? And he said, no, that's not what's going to happen at all. You're going to have entire towns empty.

that are totally empty. And most of the big cities are going to remain the same level of population density. So this probably doesn't speak particularly well for your current working hypothesis because you're not going to have an even removal of humans across the entirety of a country. They're still going to congregate around the most popular, biggest cities with the best infrastructure and the coolest gyms and the best food or whatever it might be. Uh,

it's going to be entire towns that essentially just get abandoned. Yeah. And why would you want to? Why would you want to move out of a city where if you've lived and you've grown up there and you've got instant access to all of these things that really speaks to that instant gratification? Mind you, I grew up in a city and I've moved to a smaller one. And the idea that I couldn't go to a corner shop and buy paracetamol at 2 a.m., like,

you know, really sent the, you know, the shits at me. And then I just got over it when I found out that it was fine. So I think either what's going to happen is you're going to need to incentivize moving out. That can be done. You know, people can be nudged or it's more about saying, well, if people don't want to stay in those cities, what can we do to, because it's meant to be this idea of a subtle cue, right? So it's not necessarily something that people are aware of, but it's just,

The idea that people's everyday life is feeling a bit cramped. And there are things that you can do to diminish that feeling that don't necessarily mean that you've got to remove the number of people from a city. Have you got any idea whether income inequality impacts the family size?

Not from this study, no. And I don't actually know how to answer that question. That would be really cool. It would be cool if someone could do that. I know, for instance, income inequality does all sorts of weird things to female beautification and self-objectification, sexy selfies, Candice Blake's work, all that sort of stuff. So it would make complete sense if...

Yeah. I mean, it does all sorts of things. Again, looping back around to incels, incel chatter tends to happen a bit more in high income inequality areas. One of the reasons I'm M-ing and R-ing as well is popping into my head are these examples from all these different cultures. Like there are some, I'm pretty sure the Igbo in Africa, for example,

they depend on large families. So you get to a point where income inequality, maybe income inequality isn't what you want to be looking at. You want to be looking at absolute poverty because when you get to a certain level, you really depend on having more kids in order to profit the family. The Igbo come to mind because they're a good example where in the West, normally when people

a couple has a kid, their marital satisfaction, their relationship satisfaction goes down.

quite reliably, and then swoops back up again, hopefully, if you're lucky. The Igbo is the opposite. So maternal mental health and relationship satisfaction goes up when you have additional children, because it's extra pairs of hands to help the family in the community. So there's some interesting things to think about there in terms of both ends of the scale and what having a big family actually does for you.

Body count, the internet's favourite mating topic to discuss. We spoke a little bit about this in the past. We did. What are the new nuances in there? Okay, so...

last time, when was the last time we did this? We did this probably a couple of years ago now. And during that podcast, I was like, I've got this great study that I'm writing up. Well, this is how long it takes me to write stuff up because I'm pretty sure this week I'm finally going to push the button on it. But basically, um, what I realized was this, there's quite a bit of research out there around absolute number, how many, uh,

past partners people are having, what the optimal is. Steve and I did some stuff on how willing would you be to date someone who had this number of partners, and we tracked that relationship. But one day I was there thinking, we're missing a trick here. There's an extra thing. Because if you've got 12 partners, but you had 11 of them when you were 18 and experimenting, and then you've only had one in the last 20 years,

That says something very different than the other way around, doesn't it? Like if you've got someone who had one partner when they're 18 and now they're mid-30s and you find out they had 11 in the last six months, something weird's going on, right? So it's not just about the number. It's about when they happened, right? So I've run this study and there was about 5,000 people across three studies with 15 subsamples and 11 of those subsamples were from different countries.

And what we did is we said, here is pictorially, here is a representation of someone's sexual history, the number of partners they've had and when they happened in a sort of notches on the bedpost sort of way. So this was the start. And then they had one here and one here and blah, blah, blah. So you can see it.

And then we messed with that by either by changing the number of lines. So we did 4, 12 and 36, which are the numbers from mine and Steve's original study where 4 was optimal. 12 was kind of in the middle. And 12 was the same. Was 12 the same as 1 or 0?

No, 12 was, uh, so, so zero was about the same as five or six, something like that. So you do, you do remember, right though. So, so a virgin was less desirable than having someone with one partner or two or three. Um,

went past that then it sort of starts to shoot down and the arc is longer for men than it is for women a little bit yeah yeah but it's more the the differences are more about whether you're asking about a short-term mating context or a long-term mating context so we picked four which kind of was optimal then 12 which was midway down the ramp and then 36 when it starts to tail off we said well

make those three conditions. And then what we did is we displayed those different conditions in different ways, 15 different ways each to participants, ranging from increasing in frequency sharply. So they started off with a couple of partners and then recently they've had loads through to equally spaced out over time.

to the opposite, where they had loads and loads of partners around their sexual debut, and then they've really slowed down and had some clear long-term relationships, right? And we ran that with all the countries and stuff, and we found some really interesting stuff. So first of all, the first thing to say is that effect of, and we were saying basically, here's someone's sexual history, how willing would you be to go on a date with them in a sort of long-term context? So would you entertain a relationship with this person?

Reliably, four scored higher than 12, scored higher than 36. Every single country. China, Brazil, Poland, Australia, Norway, UK, US, Greece, Slovakia. I've got to pick it. There's going to be one that I've missed in Norway. Every single country. A little bit of a variation in the strength of the effect, but they're everywhere you look. And there's some marked differences there.

uh if in terms of culture but you find out it's a constant so that was the first thing so first of all that's to my knowledge the first look at body count cross-culturally and it seems to point at something which there's some small relative differences between cultures but by and large it's something that is a human constant but then what we found was an interaction with this frequency change thing so the differences between 4 12 and 36 are the largest when it looks like

new partners is increasing in frequency. Then it becomes super important the number of past partners that you've had. So if you were to take four, for example, the line kind of looks like this. If you've had four partners, it doesn't really matter when they were, you're kind of appraised similarly. But when you go for 12 and 36, it changes and people become a lot more forgiving and

If those partners, if those new partners are confined to the past and we're around sexual debut and you've kind of slowed down, then the sizes shrink between them. And again, we find that in every single sub-sample and every single culture that we looked at, which is fascinating. I'm the worst type of cross-cultural psychologist going because I don't care so much about the differences. I care about the universal element. And that's something we found, but also really interesting.

almost next to no sex differences whatsoever, which is opposite to this sexual double standard thing that people predict. So people think, oh, you know, the guys will really care about the number of past partners that women have. The women won't. It's sort of like, oh, you know, he's a chad. I'll excuse him. No evidence of that pretty much at all. So men and women, when they're appraising someone for a long-term relationship, kind of want the same things. And actually, funnily enough,

This is something that's a wider research program thing. So there's this study. There's some stuff I've done with Steve. There's some stuff I've done with Leif Kinnear. Time and time again, people think that there will be a sexual double standard. They predict that other people will give a sexual double standard. But when you get people to respond from their perspective, they don't, which is quite interesting. Just...

Elaborate on that. I'm a bit confused. So sexual double standard is, so there's this societal level and then personal level. So societal level would be

Hypothetically, if I said to you, would a woman respond about a man with 12 sexual partners differently to a man responding about a woman with 12 sexual partners? If we asked people that, what would they say? And participants will come back and say, oh yeah, if you asked a bunch of people that, you'll find that the men will be much harsher on women and women will be much harsher on men.

So they report that that's what's going to happen because that's the societal level expectation. But then you get the same participants and you say, yeah, but what do you think? Would you date that person? And you actually look at what people do and the actual judgments they make when they have to personally do it. You don't find evidence of that double standard. So people think that people are going to act a certain way, but they end up not doing it. Do you know what the Keynesian beauty contest is?

And it brings up Balbi. You're going to have to remind me. It's basically not. It's imagine a beauty contest in the first version of it. Me and you and the rest of the judges are trying to judge who we think is the most attractive. In the second version of it, me and you and the rest of the judges are trying to judge who we think the other judges will think are most attractive. So a Keynesian beauty contest is kind of the way that the financial markets work.

right? It's not necessarily about which is the best company. It's about which do other people think is the best company. And you can continue to scale this up three, four, five, six orders away. And it's kind of a little bit like that. It's like, what do you think other people would think? And then what would you do? But people decide to not use their Keynesian answer compared with their personal answer. They never actually decide to draw that link.

Gotcha, yeah. So it's like levels, multiple combinations of theory of mind. Yeah, absolutely. And that feels like what we've got going on here, but just with that one level above. It doesn't seem to feed into people's personal behavior. And of course, that's the most accurate source.

And it can kind of be harmful because if we're constantly saying that there's a sexual double standard here, we're reinforcing the idea that men are overly critical towards women about their sexual history. We're also reinforcing this idea that women will let guys get away with things and not hold them to the same standard. When if the reality is we find that people are actually doing that, then we've got a discrepancy between what society says people do and what they actually do.

Oh yeah. Andrew Thomas, ladies and gentlemen, dude, I love your work. I've very much appreciated watching what you've been putting out. Where should people go? They want to read the things that you write in your columns and your tweets and everything else. Probably two things. So Twitter, which is at Dr. Thomas AG, but also from a therapeutic perspective, maybe checking out andreathomas.org. I've got detail on there about what I do and how to reach out to you.

Cool. Dude, I appreciate you. Until next time. Cheers.