William Costello

Who he is

William Costello is a doctoral researcher studying individual differences and evolutionary psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a member of David Buss's evolutionary psychology lab. He took his MSc in Psychology: Evolution and Culture at Brunel University London in 2021, graduating with distinction, and is a visiting researcher with Glenn Geher's evolutionary psychology lab at SUNY New Paltz. His research focus is the psychological profile of incels, read through the lens of evolutionary psychology and the tension between modern environments and evolved mating psychology. ^[1]

What distinguishes his work in this field is method: rather than analysing forum posts from the outside, his studies collect primary survey responses from self-identified incels, which remains rare in the literature. In 2023 the American Psychological Association's Division 51, the Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinities, named him its Student of the Year. ^[3]

What his data show

His 2022 study in Evolutionary Psychological Science, with Vania Rolon, Andrew Thomas and David Schmitt, compared 151 self-identified incels with 378 non-incel men. The incels reported markedly higher depression, anxiety and loneliness and lower life satisfaction, scored higher on a measure of interpersonal victimhood, and were more likely to be living with parents or NEET. Notably, the groups did not differ significantly in political orientation, and believing their situation was permanent, the core blackpill tenet, predicted lower life satisfaction. ^[2]

His Journal of Sex Research work was described by UT Austin as the first formal investigation of incel mating psychology. It found that incels systematically misjudge what women want: they overestimate how much women value physical attractiveness and financial resources and underestimate the value placed on intelligence, kindness and humour. Contrary to the stereotype of entitled standards, incels in the study reported lower minimum mate-preference standards than non-incel men. ^[3] The finding cuts directly against blackpill doctrine, since the ideology's central empirical claims about female preferences are the thing his data contradict.

The UK government study

With Joe Whittaker and Andrew Thomas of Swansea University, where he holds an honorary research position, Costello conducted research for the UK's Commission for Countering Extremism described by the government as the world's largest study of incels. ^[7] Its findings, published in February 2024, were stark on mental health: one in five incel respondents had contemplated suicide every day over the previous two weeks. Politically, respondents averaged centre-left, against the common assumption of a far-right population, though the roughly five per cent who said harassing perceived adversaries was often justified skewed centre-right. The press release's headline conclusion was that the incel phenomenon is more closely aligned to mental-health support than counter-terrorism interventions. ^[4] The study also found mental-health status predicted harmful attitudes more reliably than patterns of social networking. ^[7]

Data over panic

Costello's public positioning, as this site reads it, is "data over panic": take the violence seriously, but size the response to the evidence. Writing for Crime+Investigation, he noted that approximately 50 people worldwide have been killed in incel-linked attacks, that 80 per cent of incels in his research completely rejected violence, and that 42 per cent of incels in his US and UK sample identified as ethnic minorities, arguing that rare acts of violence can be taken seriously without being turned into moral panic. ^[5] With Buss, he co-authored a 2023 paper asking why, given the volume of violent rhetoric in incel spaces, there is not more incel violence, answering partly through an evolutionary mismatch between ancestral mating environments and modern anonymised dating. ^[6]

Where he stands in the debate

Costello works from within evolutionary psychology, and his framing differs sharply from scholars such as Debbie Ging and Lisa Sugiura, who read incel communities primarily as misogynist radicalisation, and from Laura Bates, who treats the wider manosphere as extremism. His critics regard the evolutionary frame as underweighting ideology; his data, meanwhile, are among the few in the field gathered from incels themselves, and they are cited by researchers on every side of that argument. This site draws on his published findings where they are the best available evidence and notes the interpretive dispute rather than settling it.