Why Nobody Seems To Care About Incels - 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, uh, not a- not a good idea. But no, that was, uh, a really interesting experience because we produced a piece of research that was funded by, uh, an arm's 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, and that was one of the biggest incels studies to date. Um, and the Women & 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, uh, a fantastic experience. All recorded and online. I didn't realize how they- how they do these things these days. It's all sort of part of the public record. Um, but hopefully will kind of inform policy a little bit and- and dispel some of the myths around the incel 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 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. 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 (laughs) 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, 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 tried to predict incel harm, and harm we- is defined quite loosely as a combination of misogynistic beliefs, the condoning of violence, and seeing feminism as the- as the enemy. Sorry, that was in ideology. Um, uh, of- of, uh, aggression and aggressive tendencies, 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 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. Uh, I was interested in a mental health perspective primarily because I've taken a little bit of a left turn into that p- uh, particularly in male psychology. Uh, and of course we had Will Costello that your- your listeners will probably be very familiar with, uh, and he's sort of, uh, knee-deep constantly in incel 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 some, uh, degree. So they're- the- 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, incel 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 inc- the worse of an 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 ide- ideologies is notoriously difficult. It's one of the most difficult things you can do when it comes to mod- modifying behavior. But mental health, we have a- a- a much better track record of doing something about that. And so what that study kind of imple- implied to me is one avenue we could explore is looking at supporting the 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 wanna 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, 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 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 in prison, there was a in- 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 that the inmates that you give physical health support to, re-offending went up, whereas if you gave generic general mental health support to them, re-offending rates when they left went down.