A study at Swansea University found incels - or involuntary celibates - overestimated physical attractiveness and finances, while underestimating kindness, humour and loyalty.

The study's co-author Andrew Thomas said "thinking errors" could "lead us down some quite troubling paths".

He said mental health support was crucial, as opposed to "demonisation".

The term refers to a community, largely online, of mainly heterosexual men frustrated by their inability to form romantic or sexual relationships.

The idea dates back more than 30 years and was popularised by a website offering support for lonely people who felt left behind.

Study: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00224499.2023.2248096

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Findings revealed that incels have a lower sense of self-perceived mate-value and a greater external locus of control regarding their singlehood

He added they had also observed a "bidirectional relationship between mental health and incel ideology".

"So the worse an incel's mental health is, the more they seem to then buy into ideology," he said.

IMO this is all because the whole ideology is cope. Someone believes their problems are caused by an external adversary and there's nothing they can do about it because that's the most comfortable path of least resistance emotionally.

Though honestly I think a bitter and depressed person is going to have a pretty tough time becoming genuinely kinder and funnier, even if they can bring themselves to accept this as closer to a realistic solution than something based on a presumption of women being shallow gold diggers.