Anna Lamb in The Harvard Gazette:
What happens when lonely men, embittered by a sense of failure in the sexual marketplace, find each other and form communities on the internet? The result can be deadly.
A new paper by Harvard psychology postdoc Miriam Lindner explores the rise of male “incels,” short for involuntary celibates, and their susceptibility to extremist ideologies and behaviors. Linder argues that despite a string of mass shootings and violent attacks by men espousing incel ideologies in recent years there has been a relative lack of research into the drivers behind the phenomenon.
Lindner uses an evolutionary psychology framework to understand the behavior of these men amid the accelerating social and economic shifts in gender roles and the ways the internet makes possible an “ecology where incel beliefs can thrive and make violence attractive.”
Essentially, Lindner finds these behaviors are rooted in those that proved to be most evolutionarily advantageous and so more likely to be passed along to a next generation.
More here.