William Costello

University of Texas at Austin | UT · Department of Psychology

Incels (involuntary celibates) are a subculture community of men who build their identity around their perceived inability to form sexual or romantic relationships. To address the dearth of primary data collected from incels, this study compared a sample (n = 151) of self-identified male incels with similarly aged non-incel males (n = 378) across a...

Adult individuals frequently face difficulties in attracting and keeping mates, which is an important driver of singlehood. In the current research, we investigated the mating performance (i.e., how well people do in attracting and retaining intimate partners) and singlehood status in 14 different countries, namely Austria, Brazil, China, Greece, H...

Incels (involuntary celibates) are an online subculture community of men who form an identity around their perceived inability to form sexual or romantic relationships. They attribute their lack of success to genetic factors, evolved mate preferences, and social inequities. While we have a deep ancestral history of incels, the modern incel communit...

Mating represents a suite of fundamental adaptive problems for humans. Yet a community of men, called incels (involuntary celibates), forge their identity around their perceived inability to solve these problems. Many incels engage in misogynistic online hostility, and there are concerns about violence stemming from the community. Despite significa...

This is the largest survey of incels to-date (n=561), taken across the UK and the US. It explores their demographics, beliefs, mental health, neurodiversity, networks and propensity to violence.

A prospective partner’s sexual history provides important information that can be used to minimise mating-related risks. Such information includes the number of past sexual partners, which has an inverse relationship with positive suitor evaluation. However, sexual encounters with new partners vary in frequency over time, providing an additional di...

Incels (involuntary celibates) are an online subculture of men who form their identity around their perceived inability to form sexual or romantic relationships. Incels have a nihilistic perspective of the self, strong misogynistic beliefs about women, and importantly share the view that society hates them. This novel study explores the gaps betwee...

The increasing occurrence of singlehood raises the question of whether people enjoy greater emotional wellbeing alone or in an intimate relationship. Guided by an evolutionary theoretical framework of human emotions, the current research aimed to address whether individuals are emotionally better off single than in an intimate relationship, taking...

Incels (involuntary celibates) are a misogynistic online subculture of men who form their identity around their perceived inability to establish sexual relationships. This commentary addresses the critique presented by Carian et al. (2023) in "Intervening in Problematic Research Approaches to Incel Violence," published in Men and Masculinities. Car...

Objectives: A bibliometric analysis by Zagaria (2024) claimed that research in Evolutionary Psychology (EP) lags behind research grounded in the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) in prevalence and growth rate, questioning EP’s status as a scientific revolution. This commentary aims to re-evaluate Zagaria’s findings and conclusions. We raise two...

Incels (Involuntary Celibates) are a subculture community of men who form their identity around a perceived inability to form sexual or romantic relationships. The community operates almost exclusively online, providing an outlet for misogynistic hostility. There are growing concerns about violence from incels, who have been highlighted as an (inte...

The current research aimed to study the strategies that people employ in order to become more desirable as mates in different cultural settings. More specifically, using a closed‐ended questionnaire on a sample of 7181 participants from 14 different countries, we identified 10 different strategies that people employ to become more appealing as mate...

The current study hypothesized that feminized female faces would be perceived as more trustworthy than masculinized female faces. Participants were shown 48 female faces on computer screens (50% feminized and 50% masculinized) and asked to rate the perceived trustworthiness of each face. A t-test was used to find that feminized female faces were pe...

Presentation of research replicating and expanding upon unpublished data from Buss and Schmitt (1998) investigating how accurate/inaccurate each sex is at predicting the sexual desires of the opposite sex and the average member of their own sex. Specifically, participants were asked questions derived from the seminal sexual strategies theory (Buss...

his is the second paper carved out of the lead author's MSc dissertation. In 2021, William Costello graduated with an MSc in Psychology, Culture, and Evolution from Brunel University London. Under the supervision of Prof. David P. Schmitt (co-author on this paper), his dissertation investigated the underlying psychology of incels (involuntary celib...

Poster presentation for Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) Conference 2023. Features research from Costello et al. (2022) on Levels of Wellbeing Among Men who are Incels (Involuntary Celibates), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-022-00336-x#citeas Also features research from Costello et al. (in preparation) on Th...

Preprint of the first paper from my dissertation research carried out as part of my MSc in Psychology, Culture and Evolution at Brunel University. The dissertation investigated levels of wellbeing and mating psychology among men who are incel (involuntary celibate). This first paper focuses on levels of wellbeing. Abstract Incels (involuntary celi...

There exists a dearth of primary data collected from self-identified incels (involuntary celibates), the sub-culture of men who build their identity around their perceived inability to form sexual or romantic relationships. The incel community operates almost exclusively online, providing an outlet to express misogynistic hostility, frustration and...

Incels (involuntary celibates) are a sub-culture community of men who build their identity around their perceived inability to form sexual or romantic relationships. To address the dearth of primary data collected from incels, this study compared a sample (n = 151) of self-identified male incels with similarly aged non-incel males (n = 378) across...

Presentation of my MSc dissertation research investigating the underlying psychology of incels (involuntary celibates). Research conducted during my MSc in Psychology, Culture and Evolution at Brunel University London 2020/21.

Although research shows that women recognise sexual exploitability cues, there is a relative dearth of research investigating sexually exploitative female mating strategies. Human mating is primarily cooperative, and men are not united to compete intersexually against women. Despite shared interdependent reproductive goals, the evolutionary interes...

Theoretical MSc poster presented at, - University of Stirling Evolutionary Perspectives on Culture Conference 2021 (voted best poster) - NEEPS (Northeastern Evolutionary Psychology Society) Conference 2021 - British Psychological Society Male Psychology Conference 2021 Abstract Modern humans have approximately twice as many female ancestors as...