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In recent decades, we’ve become increasingly accustomed to hearing about mass shootings, hate crimes, and other acts of mass violence in the U.S. The vast majority of these crimes are committed by men, but a recent study identifies another common factor – a growing online community of “incels” who embrace misogynistic attitudes. It’s called “The Sense in Senseless Violence, Male Reproductive Strategy, and the Modern Sexual Marketplace as Contributors to Violent Extremism.” Morning Edition Host Luis Hernandez spoke with the study’s author, Miriam Lindner, Assistant Teaching Professor of Psychology at the University of Rhode Island.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Transcript:
Hernandez: Miriam, you focus on online communities known as incels. This is a term that stands for involuntary celibates. What defines this community? How do they interact? How do they express themselves online? Who are they?
Lindner: What defines the internal community is essentially sexlessness or the inability to find a romantic or sexual partner, and they conglomerate in online spaces to air their grievances among each other. When you look at the content of their language, it’s very often hopeless, hostile, misogynistic, aggressive. The typical man in this group is probably in their sexual prime. They are young men. We think that they’re mostly white, even though they’re mixed statistics about this. They’re young. They’re eager to find a partner. So that demographic really seems very susceptible to the incel movement.
Hernandez: Why did you want to study this particular group?
Lindner: I had originally intended to do different work, and then the pandemic hit and I was working on evolutionary psychological accounts of aggression. I thought everything about this community screams evolutionary psychology, so I went ahead and started studying them. I also think it’s very important from a societal kind of perspective. We see a lot of hate crimes, a lot of mass shootings. We also see a lot of suicidality among men, so I thought that it was very important to study this demographic as they’re implicated in both of these types of violence.
Hernandez: Your study indicates that a large percentage of men who perpetrate mass violence are part of these incel communities and they harbor misogynistic attitudes towards women. How do we know this?
Lindner: We know this from different sources. For one, we can look at manifestos of mass shooters who’ve committed outrageous acts of violence in the past. Many of them will share that they’ve flirted with incel ideology. Some of them explicitly state that they are self-identifying incels.
We also know that, [with] some shootings where it’s rumored that there may have been some sort of incel identification, that they’re being celebrated online – on occasion, at least. We see that some of them will express a lot of support for these types of violence. But we know that in terms of research, people who fantasize about certain acts of violence are more likely to actually perpetrate them.
Hernandez: What’s the connection between incel communities and mass violence? What makes some incels susceptible to these extremist ideas?
Lindner: So I posit that it’s a very unique interaction between evolved male psychology that uses means of aggression and coercion in response to certain types of sexual grievances and the sexual marketplace, the dynamics of it and modern technologies. So if you have an evolved male psychology that is already conducive to using certain aggressive strategies and you amplify these in a modern environment, you could see how that could play out.
Hernandez: Do we consider men who are in this group as having mental illness issues? What role does mental illness play in all of this?
Lindner: I think mental illness can be an amplifying factor, but I would be hesitant to say that it is the cause of this type of violence. A lot of people are struggling with their mental health. A lot of people suffer from mental illness and they’re not perpetrating atrocious crimes or violence.
Hernandez: There’s so many labels and so many things that are flying in the zeitgeist today. We don’t want to just automatically say, well, this guy is an incel because he’s even speaking up about his loneliness. How do we deal with that?
Lindner: I think it’s important to be careful with applying labels to anybody, right? On the one hand, you could end up with men who hear about this term and this community for the first time, then kind of flocking to it to get support and maybe end up in a more hateful spiral of communication about loneliness and about hopelessness. At the same time, I think it’s very [important] that we are careful with this label and apply it to men who are self-identifying incels. If they have grievances, then they should be able to air them. But I also think that just labeling everyone an incel kind of takes away from some of the threat that this community can be posing at times.
Hernandez: How do you hope this research is going to help? I’m wondering, what is it going to take? Is it just reaching out to people on social media about the dangers? Do we have to pass laws on this? What do we do?
Lindner: I think, to make people aware of the fact that a lot of their responses to specific grievances like sexual or romantic rejection are normal – they are almost programmed into evolved male psychology, if you will – can instill a moment of pause, a moment of reflection where you become cognizant of that feeling of that grievance. But you have a choice as to not act on it. We know that one of the most fruitful things to do when it comes to stereotyping is to make people aware of the fact that we all have stereotypes, but whether or not we act on these biases and stereotypes is something that is up to us and under deliberate control. I think in that way it translates very much into this domain as well.
Hernandez: What’s next for you in this research?
Lindner: One of the things that I’m very passionate about is to develop an assessment tool that will allow us to identify men who are either at risk of committing violence against others or against themselves. I think it’s a tool that’s very much needed to kind of be able to say, this person is more likely to self-harm, to suffer from suicidal ideation, versus a person who is more likely to be coercive in their behaviors [and] engage in open acts of aggression or violence.
Hernandez: With all the work that you’ve done and everything that you’ve seen and experienced and learned during this journey, I’m just wondering what else you want to add about this? What do you want to share with people?
Lindner: I want to share that having very open and transparent dialogues is important. I think it’s important that we support people who end up on the wrong side of the algorithm by just being very open about the fact that this is how modern communication works. It’s important to be kind to people. We’re all human. We all experience grievances. The fact that we experience them is not an abnormal thing, but we have control over how we respond.
Hernandez: Miriam Lindner is an assistant teaching professor of psychology at the University of Rhode Island. She’s the author of the new study called “The Sense in Senseless Violence, Male Reproductive Strategy, and the Modern Sexual Marketplace as Contributors to Violent Extremism.” Professor, it’s such a pleasure. Thank you for the insight. I really appreciate it.
Lindner: Thank you so much for having me.
The post URI study finds links between mass violence and online incel communities appeared first on TPR: The Public's Radio.