Identifying Pathways to the Incel Community and Where to Intervene: A Qualitative Study with Former Incels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The term “Incel” refers to a group of boys and/or men who feel that they have been unjustly denied relationships and sex with women due to an unfair social system, and some Incels have committed violence based on these beliefs. More broadly, self-identified Incels face social and mental health issues and can hold negative beliefs about women and other marginalized genders, which may lead them to harm both themselves and others. In this research, we seek to understand the experiences that may lead men to become Incels. We interviewed 21 people who identified as former Incels about their experiences joining and leaving Incel groups, with the goal of understanding how men find their way into these groups, and how resources might be adapted to prevent young men from becoming Incels. A reflexive thematic analysis generated two major themes with subthemes. The first theme, Seeking help online for struggles meeting masculinity norms , had three subthemes that reflected the specific struggles being experienced: I’m a loser because I can’t get women , I’m all alone , and I have no value . The second theme, Down the rabbit hole: Finding help online from the Incel community , had three subthemes that reflected the several ways they were validated by the community: It’s not your fault , You belong here , and You are special . These findings highlight specific pathways that lead men to Incel communities and why they join them, and potential points for intervention that center pressures for boys and men to conform to masculine norms.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".