Psychosocial Characteristics of Involuntary Celibates (Incels): A Review of Empirical Research and Assessment of the Potential Implications of Research on Adult Virginity and Late Sexual Onset
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Incels are defined as involuntary celibates who are part of an online community characterized by an anti-women ideology. We review research on the psychosocial characteristics of people identifying as Incels and compare their characteristics with general research on adult virginity and late sexual onset. Studies were identified through database search (Scopus, PubMed, PsycInfo and Google Scholar). Findings from 59 empirical studies were included. Incels are demographically, ethnically, and religiously diverse. Analyses of Incel forum discussions and survey responses report on psychological issues relating to negative body image, shyness, anxiety, social skill deficits, autism, bullying, sexual and romantic inexperience, loneliness, depression, and suicide. Research on adult virginity and late sexual onset report similar psychosocial characteristics and indicate feelings of being sexually “off time” relative to peers, but without a high prevalence of anti-women ideology. Future studies should focus on identifying why some sexually inexperienced adults participate in anti-women forums and identify as Incels, and if their mental health and psychosocial issues appeared before or after self-identifying as an Incel.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".