I would love to see the part of the study that says this and how they controlled for various factors. Are rhe baselines just other studies built on surveys? Self perception is terribly inaccurate much of the time, and we all know people put more emphasis on the things they don't have than the ones they already do.

Yes. Hence Orwellian, and not just totalitarian [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...

To reply to myself - the really hilarious bit about all this, is the incels seem to be folks stuck half way between ‘blue pill’ (an actually good guy) and redpill (‘bad boys’).

And in some ways, just like in the original matrix, the blue pill does result in an easier steak dinner if you play your cards right (also not easy to actually do), and the red pill will get you relentlessly hunted and destroyed unless you’re pretty good at a game no one ‘in the system’ prepared you for or could even safely acknowledge ever existed.

So for incels, near as I can tell the issue isn’t so much one position or another that they are taking. But that the ‘pill’ is stuck and so they can’t actually be either one in reality.

Which makes a lot of sense if part of them knows they’ll be immediately massacred if they ‘took the pill’ because they don’t have the strength, knowledge, or support to handle it, but also have seen enough behind the societal ‘curtain’ and have suffered enough problems from normal society and interactions that they can’t just go and eat their steak like cypher either.

Maladaptive Conditioning and PTSD is a bitch.

And so that causes cognitive dissonance, pain, and all the other issues - including causing them to lash out at the thing triggering all these difficult feelings of inferiority, fear, confusion, etc. aka women