Frazer Heritage (Manchester Metropolitan University) Caveman Theories, Modern Misogyny: Evolutionary Psychology in Incel Fora This talk explores how incel communities (i.e., misogynistic communities of men who want to, but do not, have sexual/romantic relationships with women), draw on evolutionary psychology within their online interactions. Evolutionary psychology is a discipline that seeks to explore psychological behaviours, with the view that these are adaptations which are the result of ancestral problems - most notably those which have stemmed from sexual needs and behaviours. There is, understandably, a significant body of feminist critique of evolutionary psychology. I take the position that evolutionary psychology is inherently anti-feminist, misogynistic, and queer-phobic. I also take the view that many of the findings from evolutionary psychology are based on unfounded claims and are tantamount to pseudo-science. Using methods from corpus linguistics, I demonstrate that incels use pseudo-science associated with evolutionary psychology when discussing, for example, "mating preferences". The data demonstrate that such language is often used to justify misogynistic (and racist) world views . Given that the ontological underpinnings of evolutionary psychology are misogynistic and anti-feminist, this also has implications for work exploring the behaviours of incels (see Lucy et al., under review). This paper ends by discussing a clear issue around the impact of evolutionary psychology in relation to investigating incels: namely, how research funded by the UK government has employed an evolutionary psychological perspective that has normalised such misogynistic worldviews, and provided justification for these ideologies to be propagated.

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