Why Nobody Seems To Care About Incels - Dr Andrew Thomas

you spoke at the houses of Parliament what was that there I did yeah that was daunting and it was really hot and I decided to wear my three piece which was uh not not a good but no that was uh a really interesting experience because we produced a piece of research that was funded by an arms length body of the home office uh into incels uh 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 um and the women INE equality Select Committee were really interested in it and so they called myself Joe Whitaker and will to come and talk to them about the report a little bit more which was uh a fantastic experience all recorded and online I didn't realize how they how they do these things these days all sort of part of the public record um but hopefully we'll kind of inform policy a little bit and and dispel some of the myths around the Insel phenomenon I think because um the primary research is what we need to be doing that there's a lot of theoretical stuff out there it'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 uh 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 un quot a problem and that we should try to reduce the online misogynistic ideology 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 um and so in order to figure out what that is we have to entertain lots of different options um now what we did with our recent study was we try to predict incel harm and harm is defined quite Loosely as a combination of misogynistic beliefs but condoning of violence and seeing feminism as the as the enemy sorry that wasn't ideology um uh 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 uh now my colleague Joe Whit who's a criminologist he was really interested in networking how insults are talking to each other and whether that sort of ratchets things up and contributes to risk uh I was interested in a mental health perspective primarily because I've taken a little bit of a left turn into that uh particularly in male psychology uh and of course we had will Calo that you your listeners will probably be very familiar with uh and he's sort of kneed deep constantly in incel ideology and so we were able to run these three things kind of in parallel and C which actually predicts harm the most and we found something really interesting so the first thing is they all predicted harm in some uh degree so there 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 incel networking and reduce that then the risk of harm might go down but we also found that uh 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 um but it means that if you're if you want good bang for your buck looking at the mental health and the ideology um 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 bidirectional back and forth way so what that basically means is that the worst an in a worse incel's 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 a much better track record of doing something about that and so what that study kind of imp implied to me is one Avenue we could explore is looking at supporting with mental health and that in and of itself is probably a worthy goal because people who 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 at getting uh at the issue so absolutely I think it's it's not something that we should take off the table but it's controversial right so if you look at the um the research evidence on just Rea offending I'm not saying that in cells are criminals but if you look at the forensic literature and you look at reoffending 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 reoffending went up whereas if you get generic General mental health support to them reoffending rates when they left went down what's physical health support So Physical would be just it sort of encouraging exercise and um mainly exercise intervention to be honest um 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 um very palatable and I see a similar thing going on with the inel 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 U more on that later because there's huge variety within that Community as I come to learn in private practice um 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 uh full 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 so 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 it contributes to creating uh 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 understand what you mean that sort of the incel problem but it it feels an awful lot like sort of 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 an incal problem that the the point is there isn't just the one route right um but yeah you're you're you're 100% right there's there's suffering there I think the sour grapes is on the part of people looking in at that as a potential intervention um 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 instance so I think it's a 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 leg work 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 is neat not in education employment or training who uh absolutely hates hates women and is indeed a threat to women um 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 there they people were using domestic violence rates as evidence of sell harm totally glossing over the fact that well you have to partner in do you see what I mean so so it's it's almost like they they fall into this very sort of system one fast thinking group of just bad men yeah and I think people uh respond to that with that sort of abital good gut feeling just towards bad men who might do them harm uh 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 uh 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 I you can understand it in some ways from uh 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 perly nice and supportive of women I know that they're more left leaning on average I know that they have autism rates like 10 times that of the Bas base rate of the population so you know they they're very in many ways uh deserving of the sympathy that women typically would give to a down andout 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 in seexual competition for men kind of the same way as the body positivity movement for women might be women encouraging their fat 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 uh 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 Bro Science pulled out of my ass yeah so it's just it's just a notion it's a good and who knows it might be right but my what I suspect is that we need to look more about at 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 struggling and you know maybe they're a bit of a loser and stuff and that's the optimal place to to then take someone under your wing and help them yeah now incels by and large uh go into these sort of pseudo Anonymous or Anonymous forums where no one really knows each other hiding behind uh 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 um you know some incels were spending like five six hours a day in these uh forums now that's that means they're not leaving the house they're not actually going out and touching grass some some might say and they're not socializing in those more traditional ways that actually lends itself to social support uh 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 you know 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 like it's what will normally calls like performative antagonism so incel say well Society rejects be 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 um and in Psychotherapy actually we would we would uh see this as a little bit of a cycle so uh it's kind of similar to perfectionism so uh with perfectionists if they feel like they can't accomplish something they will just self-sabotage and it's all 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 if I go first so I'll say something like oh you know the uh this is one example I always Ed 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 n and guys can freeuse her and that will solve the problem now when you talk to himself 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 Boren and it's specifically to get a rise out of people the problem is Media then picks up on that thinks it's straight thinks they 100% believe that in their 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 brw haha recently with uh 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 lack explanatory power and methological 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 researches incorporate feminist structural and intersectional approaches in their work and conceptualize misogynist incel ideology and violence as products of male supremacist culture and structure what does that mean um it means that someone went to chat GPT and says I don't like the idea that incels might uh can explain away what they're do with mental health um and I'm really into feminism craft for me an academic sounding Journal article and then we'll publish it I've saying that with tongue and cheek it obviously the authors care a lot about the Insel 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 like they're 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 um 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 postto but at the same time science is science and there shouldn't be an excuse of putting something out there that's just just bad and not helping there is also a if you start playing with fire dot dot dot kind of expect yeah and when I say bad I I just mean on like a logical fallacy front because I think on the the Tweet the tweet that I put out about this i' give an example of at least like 17 fallacies in there including uh very very close to the knuckle ad homonym attacks uh in there you know questioning um the sexuality of um of incel researches and saying that that gets in the way um you know uh criticizing the rigor of of the theories that have been used while suggesting a pet theory that generally isn't very rigorous at all uh leveraging a lot of claims that are unfalsifiable um it's just not very helpful um 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 helping about sorting out this problem or helping people we should explore all avenues is there a lot of Insel violence uh so it depends right so some people Define violence as um 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 perpetuate perpetuation of misogynistic views as violence then of course there's inel 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 Boo Haram for example the number of actual Insel attack is very very small and not only is it very small but a lot of them after the fact there's a big question mark raised over whether um they're inel motivated attacks at all so Alec manasian is the the the example that comes to mind where he actually put a social media post implying that it was an incel 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 Verdi verdict uh they could conclude that that was a lie and that he he wasn't inspired by that at all so when you take some of those out you're talking about very low double- digigit figures from a community where I think last time I went on the Forum there were uh 26,000 members but that's just the people who use one Forum predominantly from one country um and of course what other people don't realize is that Insel is kind of an identity uh it also just just kind of describes reproductive status at a basic level I'm I'm not having sex when and that I feel like that's outside of my control but you have some guys out there that I call incel adjacent so they don't 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 who are very close to it who are doing a lot of harm online with the um what they they're promoting and sometimes what they're doing you know like uh doxing people and um which can ruin people's lives or modifying uh people's pictures to put clothes back on them that can be very upsetting um I mean it's 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 yeah but I never put those things in the same ballpark as someone who uh has shot you or stabbed you or or cross that line into 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 Rogen you think Mass skull shooter you think kinetic uh some form of big incident that that is 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 Cur up uh 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 uh Journal 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 um so people should be be able to access that um and yes there's there's this idea that actually maybe we should be expecting more given the numbers and there be things getting in the way like the fact that um incels so do a lot of talking online in those sort of pseudo Anonymous communities so we talked a lot about this with in the paper with regards to networking the paper that we did for the the home office if you look at the types of organizations that do a lot of physical violence they have um an ideology and they have an ideology with an end goal so they they have a specific goal that they want to realize incels don't have that but there's also a lot of small group talking inperson 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 they're not particularly organized 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 uh is it an ideology is it a movement that's where the the lines get a bit hazy because compared to other um threatening movements they don't have the same Hall marks what hempathy I saw you cite that I'd never heard of that word before Oh so um that so that's one of those terms that's thrown around like um toxic masculinity in the paper I'll be honest that with uh 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 we've gotten together some of the top Scholars uh including uh a woman of color by the way um to craft a response to that article it's actually longer than the original article pointing out all the fla flaws and justifying why um a mental health lens might be might be good to at least entertain with this uh and part of the article we kind of attack the fact that the the authors use these kind of nebulous terms like toxic masculinity like hempathy to sort of downplay the suffering of men uh and demonize some stereotypically male behavior um 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 myo um but one thing's for certain it it doesn't help there's a there's a lot of terminology in this debate that isn't helpful okay some of it is through imprecision so like we were talking about violence earlier right so if you've got 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 um similarly I think in a lot of this discourse things like empathy things like toxic toxic masculinity they're very nebulous terms that kind of get in the way and turn the discourse really into word salad but they're all fancy ways of saying uh men can't possibly suffer because men historically have been the repressors and not the repressed um there's a lot of that in the article one of my favorite um one of my I say favorite one of the bits that really got my backup was the argument that we you 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 Su View view of empathy exactly and zero some some 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 uh 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 uh this is a a real sort of onew Slam Dunk yeah bad people shouldn't get support and that just gets in the way because sometimes giving the support turns PE bad people into not so bad people what happens if you view and label incels as violent monsters um what happened that's such a good question it depends on the person I think so inels what we do know incels 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 uh rightly or wrongly they perceive society as not liking them they perceive Society is not empathizing with them and they're worried about putting themselves out there um in society out of fear of getting rejected and that's not just in romantic relationships um 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 um uh with will the other day actually um sometimes talking to these guys it reminds me of some of those cult um 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 um and I feel like the Insel Forum sometimes can uh can have this 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 and so they 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 the wheel spinning obviously it's a really going back to the sympathy empathy conversation that's a very difficult cycle to step into 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 combination of [ __ ] posting and genuine resentment they are finding uh unrepresentative and edge cases and and 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 the ideology and you go I can't be bothered I can't 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 uh outer shell defensive outer shell that is difficult to penetrate uh and and and painful and arduous and and probably pretty frustrating in order to be able to try and break apart it's largely unfalsifiable uh 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 [ __ ] ton of sympathy I think that men in particular are given less sympathy the gamma bias really is very true and in the same sentence I can understand why it's so hard for somebody to go through the [ __ ] fire and brimstone let me grab my my flaming sword I'm going to cut this apart yeah and there is some so there are some cultural artifacts about the community little things that have popped up that only happen in the Insel community and doesn't happen elsewhere that also really feeds into that hardens up that shell um so I've been doing a lot of talks for mental health professionals and talking about this so people who might be practicing CBT people who are used to talk to to dealing with beliefs and softening beliefs and there are some aspects in the Insel community that are essentially reverse CBT okay 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 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 FL and think oh maybe you know 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 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 that's quite interesting one of so I I've done a lot of qualitative incel interviews about their Journey trying to engage with mental health services which has been fascinating and and really eye opening about the diversity in the community everything from very left leaning in cels with lots of um female friends who you know would never h a fly um all the way through to sort of regular prostitute users who have been doing drug dealing like massive massive scope um and one of them introduced me to the idea of crabs in a bucket have you heard of that yeah so for the listeners haven't heard of so if you get a loot of crabs in the 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 in the community as well the moment there's a little glimmer of hope people 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 [Music] 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 yeah it's School shooters we've been mythbusting quite a few of those now for a number of years who've replicated some of this work quite quite a bit and we tend to find that about a third but and this is consistent in the UK and the Us by the way about a third are bipo uh 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 um 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 inell in their 50s and 60s you get some were 188 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 Rec recently took um the Pew Center has uh like a political ideology um measure that we pinched which is uh quite interesting because what it does it gives you the leftwing statement of something and the rightwing statement it says pick which one you agree with most so it might be you know government can do a lot more to help uh help the poor versus uh the poor should get minimal funding and stand on their own two feet something like that um and people can pick everything from Environmental Policy to gay marriage to um these articles about helping out ethnic minorities um 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 Pol politically Centrist as well uh and maybe slightly left leaning and that 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 leftwing policies so that kind of makes sense they do tend to be a bit more right-wing on um 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 is often Justified um which I think in our sample is like six to 10% something like that those tend to have um quite right-wing views so they'll pick the right statement for everything so it's almost like you've got this community and then within you've got little subgroups um 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 in cells uh so again no no it's not that's that's the simple straightforward answer uh people will like to take a mean uh and just generalize it across everyone and say well that's that's the typical and the typical is universal um but even if you take something like rate myth myth acceptance even if you take something like um sexism benevolent or hostile sexism you will find people at both ends of the poll and so you can it's it's very easy to potentially overgeneralize 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 um 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 um a lot of incels that I know um almost use the incel 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 and and and 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 Tik Tok 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 um and so I think a lot of the incel 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 that's been a point of contention so this was Daniel connory Bean's uh article in the the Boston Globe that that cited that and I know Dan uh fairly well and he and he is a nice guy and I know that with that article that a lot was left on The Chopping room floor um 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 the other end so not everyone spells out the full evolutionary logic of their ideas sometimes PE people because even researchers a 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 um and so there's through sloppy writing not recognizing that who we're who we're actually writing for which with open with uh Open Access journals with pre-prints is becoming more and more public you only have to look at the black black pill Wiki and 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 uh and tighten that up and do it properly um 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 uh 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 um and and a point that kind of applies to this but stuff that I've made about other things as well if you've got an individual who the the difference between 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 100 through the reading of evolutionary psychology and so then giving the ultimate responsibility saying that there's a body counter 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 uh will and myself who actually try to correct that um 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 um and just everyone is like oh well that you need to disprove that it's like well what you want me to do man I'm 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 just lose my job and my livelihood like why would I do that plus um I think a lot of people with that particular research because it was funded by the center for countering extremism to arms length body of the uh the home office in the UK arms length means that they're 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 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 good example of you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't right for that study we paid in cells okay with the only to the best of my knowledge where the only study ever to to pay in cells 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 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 FL from the inels themselves who were like oh you know you're selling all my personal data and this is a friend and stuff like that it's like 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 the that uh people like myself and 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 overell it we won't undersell it we won't say we support it we will just d describe it as it is with an idea of trying to reduce harm that's where we sit um 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 what sorry that was a rant there you got back no that's that's exactly why I'm here uh what haven't we covered from the sort of current state of ins 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 Intel research has exploded but it's still a load of people scraping forums I mean you went to the evolution in human behavior conference uh a year ago couple years ago in Palm Springs there were loads of incel talks there very little data lot of theory lots of scraping of forums not actually going and talking to these guys and finding out what they um 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 R is 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 highly rightwing um what you might find that's super interesting we've got this as a pre-print at the moment we dug into the data in the the home office well 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 um 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 rightwing ideology and highly narcissistic and has psychopathy so at a just a beginning stage and to be hon the reason I love that is when you talk to the NHS in the UK they say to you um this feels more like a prevent issue this feels more like counterterrorism because some of these guys are really rightwing and high dark triath 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 a fly they've just got really poor social skills um 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 um and I don't know anyone apart from our team that's trying to act 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 covers all manner of sins and behaviors and uh I suppose that because everything is so new uh this still needs to be broken apart yeah people just kind of scrambling around it's almost like imagine trying to um imagine taking football Hooligans organized football Hooligans and generalizing that to football fans and everyone stly football fans when actually there's this particular Corner that we really need to get into and the others are kind of a 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 in the modern world with women outperforming men in education and employment with uh poor Mental Health for men with increasing levels of depression of self harm of male sedation hypothesis my thing and I'm I'm wondering whether we're seeing changing rates of anti-female viewpoints outside of the self-identified in cell movement yeah well the the bigger movement is the wider red pill manosphere so which is what you're essentially alluding to and if you're worried about risk of harm I actually wonder whether it's and and particularly if you want to go down this route of of the harm that you care about being perpetuation of of Mis misogyny I've been more worried about red pill manosphere communities because the main difference is that incels have taken the red pill uh and the red pill in relation to uh to feminism but where the the manosphere communities by and large use that uh to inform some sort of action incels are using it to form some sort of in action right so the red pill is that men are hard done by there's a 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 like there's these the 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 Fester over here on the other side you've got people say well I'll use that to my advantage then maybe I'll opt out of mating all together the sort of men go their own way community or I'll try to gain the system Pick Up Artist 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 Insel because it's a catchy term um it's it's more well defined out of those different commun ities but I think really we need to be broadening it to what I call online misogynistic ideology and looking looking beyond that Amy I call it Amy interesting yeah I I wonder about that I you know there's I'm going to try and say this in the most delicate way possible I think the uh 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 uh much of the incel uh movement um perpetuates or causes or uh increases uh is in some ways helping to mitigate some of the 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 or wor yeah yeah um so when it comes to the they go out and do things thing uh I would guess that people who are in this online misogyny ecosystem in infrastructure whatever your term is omy um 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 get out of the house and go and do things maybe they're gainfully employed maybe they've got hobby you know I I think that that acts as a bit of a bull walk 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 mtow and in cels men going their own way I chose to do it incels I didn't choose to do it but after a while if the incel uh ideology If part of that Cannon is you shouldn't speak to a woman in case you go to jail all 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 mtow and the incel people end up being perilously close to 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 to a nightclub not I would I could ask out 100 woman women in an evening and maybe I'll get rejected a 100 times knowing me right I've experienced 100 rounds of rejection the moment you internalize rejection uh 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 um and I think you 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 this is I don't like you very much and so this thing compounds and goes over and over and over and the way that um I think you have to break that cycle is you have to get the the the reality check in there first and foremost so is the data accurate um let's let's not be around the bush there will be some men out there who they are they they feel like they have no waiting prospects and they're right 100% yeah um 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 think well what are you going to do with your life that isn't bound up in this frustration and this uh grieving process but for a lot of people like I can't tell you the number of interviews with incels um and clients I've had as in and I've sat across someone who is more more attractive than I am like objectively um who have are opting out of 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 be 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 um so I've learned learned a lot about therapy in general now in the UK I don't know about your your experience you probably have like all singing all dancing Healthcare now um I in the UK it's it's quite common now that you have like say a GP practice and every time you go there you see a different GP the the the days of the family doctor of gone um 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 um the quality in um in therapists and the ver variability in therapists is H hundredfold larger than that um Chris could you just say for me a second I'm a counselor yes no no I 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 that there 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 um education levels and so I just want to kind of frame that because I will talk about the experiences of some of the clients 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 it's it's 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 go to the next one because chances are it'll be different next time um now the other problem is that most counselors and therapists in the UK women so if you're going to have a bad experience with a counselor chances are it's going to be because there's more of there's more of them that being said when I have her clients come to me and say I've had a really bad uh experience most of my clients are male and they do say certain things about their experiences with female counselors uh that I can't say as a pattern but it is something that I see quite regularly um 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 a female counselor in couples therapy there's a huge perception that she uh the female counselor is sided with the female partner and sort of doubled up and double teamed on the guy so you get a lot of that um but you also get common complaints about lack of empathy particularly within um 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 um I have I've met people for example who who um uh have lots of female friends they're very distressed because their female friends tell them you're an amazing person you know it's only a matter of time for you even though it's never happened um and they've gone to the 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 you get elements of that but then the real kicker the real kick in the teeth is that you get a lot of ideology entering the therapy space so I've 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 non statistic problem being that they haven't uh they don't engage with feminist ideology um and really in therapy that's a complete no no um and so actually a lot of my guys um that I've seen like I've seen conservative guys and Christian guys um guys from working class backgrounds all of which who like I can't gel with my therapist because I don't think that they 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 counsel actually matter so you see a lot of this in uh alcohol uh 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 the therapist was an alcoholic in the life or not it makes no real difference uh and similarly it doesn't have to be this way um you know guys who stick with male 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 uh but part of it in 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 they're an unfixable problem or to sort of discount mental health interventions overall yes and and this is the the problem because you've got a 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 um it kind of backfires experience is invalidated right I know that you might be feeling this but that's because of dot dott yeah and invalidation is is the bread and butter of counseling it's that it's that working relationship built on uh built on Mutual trust and understanding that get you places um and it's really sad like sometimes I find so a lot of a lot of guys SN me out because of Twitter and stuff like that and my work um and sometimes I find it really upsetting because I've worked with a lot of women as well and had really great success in in coun with 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 sat 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 them their M or just preing 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 uh vulnerability about emotional openness for men there are many levels of Hell there are many sort of circles that you can descend through from uh 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 off crime 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 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 get that that 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 going to 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 inference so what was one I saw the other day like a a Reddit post or something like that where uh a guy and a girl were watching a horror film um and he got scared for once when he's not normally 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 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 therapy setting I'll try it with one of my friends the moment they do that the number of times where they 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 being a little bit vulnerable with each other it's like a Mexican standoff so every everyone's been vulnerable a little bit so everyone's got something on on the other person and it's fine and people can just get out get it out there and and and and 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 uh 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 winse 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 your mental health um and don't get me wrong there are some some people out there who are naturally stoic and for people who are naturally stoic who aren't you know the the idea that people repress things is a bit 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 is kind of backwards and maybe that says something about the the the 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 you feel like you really do want to open up and share 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 I'm calling that the musk effect um but tagging Elon Musk hoping that that would get picked up and retweeted and then I would uh be able to make an income on Twitter with my millions of followers so co-author of mine uh Peter jonason managed to get uh the dating website service to give us some data yeah and we managed to get it from this company that basically owns a whole bunch of daating websites all over the world uh and some of them quite Niche like Jewish dating and you know uniform dating and that sort of thing um and in this data set 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 is about interest like who's getting interest on dating websites where we showed that a combination of income um and occupation predicted that people got more more hits particularly uh if they were male and this follow-up paper we thought oh we've got a data set here of four 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 um and what we basically found is that that I mean there's a bit of a a no-brainer in some respects that if you've got a lot of money um it's easier to provide for more kids and so generally speaking income predicts greater number of children um I know that you can probably find some counter examples of that from your um 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 the constraints the number of kids you have gets reduced but there's something there's also something else going on where it's people in cities by and large who are having smaller numbers of kids um and we believe there's a a reason consistent with evolution 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 full when you can't get into a GP surgery when you go to tesos and it's Black Friday and there's everyone around when you're in that sort of environment um you're getting this signal that resources are tight yeah it's space is a a premium res sources 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 um to 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 packly 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 um it's like I'm a Power Ranger um 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 know 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 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 are raised in cities rather than out on the outskirts Farms who have those very large families and also have the very large income to boot um 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 uh a city or an area is less dense than you might think it is um this is going to sound like a really really uh weird example but are you about to say that you can fix the birth rate Collapse by getting nicer walkways and putting more this this is the idea this is the idea you could have like the 50 minute cities and stuff like that the cringe example I was going to say actually is that and don't ask me why I know this but um I've been planning to like take a cruise in a a couple years uh time and there's this one Cruise Line where uh I know the ships are identical and the capacity is identical but the configuration is different and you get plaints on all of the reviews of the one ship saying it's too dance 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 well 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 R me I asked Stephen J Shaw uh probably the best population birth rate researcher that I know I asked him what's going to happen as population start to decline Let's Take America for instance uh 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 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 are every 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 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 no because you're not going to have an even removal of humans across the entirety of a a country they're still going to congregate around the most popular biggest cities 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 why would 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 I used to I grew up in a city and I've moved to a smaller one and I the idea that I couldn't go to a corner shop and buy paracetamol at 2 am like you know really s sent the uh you know the shits at me and then I just got over it when I and found out that it was fine um so I think either what's GNA happen is you g need to incentivize moving out um that 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 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 people's everyday life is feeling a bit cranked 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 um not from this study no and I don't actually ask that question that would be really cool it would be cool if someone could do that um you know I know for instance income inequality does all sorts of weird things to uh female beautification and self-objectification sexy selfies candy Blakes work all that sort of stuff so it would make complete sense if yeah I mean it does all sorts it does all sorts of things uh again looping backr to incels incel chatter tends to happen a bit more in High um income inequality areas one of the reasons I'm Ming an ring 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 um in Africa for example they depend on large families so you get to a point where income equality maybe income equality isn't what you want to be looking at you want to be looking at Absolute posit poverty because when you get to to a certain level um you really depend on having more kids in order to prop up the family the Igbo come to mind because they're a good example where in the west normally um when a couple has a kid their marital satisfaction their relationship satisfaction goes down quite reliably and then SS back up again hopefully if you're lucky uh the Yuko is is the opposite so uh maternal mental health relationship satisfaction goes up when you have additional children because it's extra pairs of hands to to help uh the family and the community so there's some interesting things to think about there in terms of both both ends of the scale and what having a big family actually does for you body count the internet's favorite mating topic to discuss we spoke a little bit about this in the past 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 during that inter 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 there's 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 you know 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 there's an we're missing a trick here there's an extra thing because if you've got 12 partners and uh 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 were 18 and now they're mid-30s and you find out they had 11 in the last six months something weirds going on right so it's not just about the number it's about when they happened right so I've I've run this study and there's about 5,000 people across three studies with 15 subsamples and 11 of those sub samples 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 on when they happened in a sort of notches on the bed post 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 Min and Steve's original study where four was optimal 12 was kind of in the middle and 12 was was 12 the same as one or zero no 12 was uh so so zero was about the same as five or six something like that so you you do remember right though so so a virgin was less desirable than having someone with one partner or two or three um when past that then it sort of starts to shoot down and the uh Arc is longer for men than it is for women uh a little bit yeah yeah but it's more the the differences are more about whether you're asking about a short ter M context or a long-ter m in 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 we started off with a couple of Partners and then recently they've had loads through to 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 countries and stuff and we found some really interesting stuff so first of all first thing to say is that effect of and we were at saying basically here's someone's sexual history how willing would you be to to go on a a date with them in a sort of long-term context so would would you entertain an 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 h there's going to be one that I've missed in the Norway um every single country 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 that as 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 412 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 um so that so if you were to take uh four for example the line kind of looks like this if you've had four Partners 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 if those Partners if the um those new partners are confined to the past and were around sexual debut and you've kind of slowed down then the sizes shrink between them and again we find that in every single subsample 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 uh sexual double standard thing that people predict so people think oh you know the 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 he's a Chad I'll I'll excuse him um no evidence of that um 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 funly enough this is something that as a 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 uh Leif caner um 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 um hypothetically if I said to you um uh would a 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 if we asked people that what would they say and participants come will come back and say oh yeah if you asked a bunch of people that you'll find that the the men will be much harsher on women and women will be much harsher on men yes so they report that that's what's going to happen because that's the societal level expectation but then then you get the same participants and you say yeah but what do you think would you um date that uh 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 uh people are gonna act a certain way but they end up not doing it do you know what the kenian beauty contest is uh rings a bell but you're going to have to remind me it's it's basically um not it's imagine a beauty contest in the first version of it uh 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 keian beauty contest is kind of the way that the uh 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 this it's like what do you think other people would think and then what would you do and but people decide to not use their Kenyan answer compared with their personal answer they never actually decide to draw that link gotcha yeah so it's like levels M multiple combinations of theory of mind yeah AB absolutely and that feels like what we've got going on here but just with that one that one level above um it doesn't seem to feed into people's personal behavior and of course that's the most accurate source um and it could 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 um towards women about their sexual history we're also uh 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 hell yeah Andrew Thomas ladies and gentlemen dude I love your work very much appreciated watching what you've been putting out where should people go they want to read the things that you write and your columns and your tweets probably two things so Twitter which is Dr Thomas AG but also from a therapeutic perspective maybe checking out Andrew thomas. org um I've got detail on there about what I do and how to reach out to me cool dude I appreciate you until next time cheers bye if you enjoyed that episode you will love a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last couple of months and it's available right here go on give him my watch