How to Fix the Incel Epidemic with Social Skills

May 23, 2014, Santa Barbara Police identified 22 year old Elliot Rodger as the man who killed six people during a Friday night rampage of stabbing and shooting near UC Santa Barbara.

Rodger was found dead in his car -- hours after a disturbing video titled "Elliot Rodger's retribution" was posted, a manifesto authorities said was a clear sign of "premeditated mass murder."

In Rodgers' YouTube video, he talks of "loneliness, rejection and unfulfilled desires" and blames women for rejecting him.

Rodgers had seen therapists off and on since he was nine years old and was reserved to the point of seeming to have trouble communicating with “an underlying sadness about him, a frustration”.

Alek Minassian, 25, was charged in a Toronto court with 10 counts of first degree murder and 13 counts of attempted murder one day after a van rampage along the sidewalk of a busy Toronto street.

While the police did not disclose a motive for the rampage, interviews with former acquaintances of Mr. Minassian and his now-deleted Facebook account, portray a troubled young man who harbored resentments toward women and appeared determined to die.

The Facebook posting by Mr. Minassian praised Elliot Rodger and “incels,” or involuntary celibates, a term used in a Reddit group where men vented frustrations that tipped into misogyny.

“Incel” stands for “involuntarily celibate.”

When we talk about “incels,” we are not talking about all men who are not having sex. Instead, we are talking about a specific subculture of people in various internet forums — subreddits like r/braincels, the chat forum 4chan, and dedicated websites like incels.me.

Many of them are simply sad and lonely men, suffering from extreme social anxiety or deep depression.

Instead of trying to support each other and work through their issues as a group, the incels in certain communities allow their resentments to curdle. They see the world through the lens of entitlement: They are owed sex but cannot have it because “women are shallow.” This manifests in a deep and profound hatred for women as a group, which shows up on a very brief scan of some of the more extreme incel communities.

But it’s not just individual women that these radical incels hate — it’s society writ large, a society that allows their perceived sexual oppression to go on.

How do individuals with antisocial lifestyles and a hatred of women and society come about?

Children socialized in family environments characterized by coercive exchanges and poor family management behaviors, in which positive social skills are not modeled or reinforced, learn to use coercive and aggressive strategies to influence others.

When children's use of coercive exchange from the family to peers outside the home occurs, children face rejection by their more socially skilled peers and become vulnerable to drifting into associations with peers who are similarly aggressive and unskilled.

Antisocial talk also appears to be an important and generally overlooked social influence process. This process also may be related to the persistence of criminal behavior from adolescence to young adulthood.

The antisocial talk and positive affective response trained delinquency, by which delinquent peers encouraged each other to engage in new types of delinquent behavior and has been associated with increases in violent behaviors and substance use.

How can we fix this? Social skills. This term refers to skills that enable an individual to interact positively with the environment, which provides positive responses and avoiding negative ones.These skills allow individuals to satisfactorily adapt to the social environmental demands.

Individuals who lack social skills need to be trained in a structured manner and be presented with situations where the learned skill is to be used. In addition, they need to be exposed to increasingly socially complex situations. A particular group who are especially prone to social deficits and who could greatly benefit from social skills training are individuals with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD).

Social skills interventions can help improve social abilities, such as cooperation, assertion, responsibility, empathy and self-control.