Translation, part I (DT traits)

It is a translation of the first part of the Russian article. I'm not the author and I've translated with the permission of the author. All credit is to the author and people working on the article.

This project was supposed to be an article about the Incels Wiki project, but in the course of work it turned into something more - this material covers in-depth the methodological critiques of many modern ways of studying the gender differences between men and women. I hope readers will find this project interesting.

Here is an article from the "Wikipedia" of the incels, which was the initial reason for this project. [The links is redacted out, as I think Reddit bans my post due to it]

The main author of the article is Alexey Stukalsky. Psychologists, translators, mathematicians and some other specialists helping, checking and proofreading this work: Vladimir Volokhonsky, Anton Lebed, Natalia Butkova, Danila Zakharov, Alexander Doe, Nadezhda Belyaeva and Elizaveta Romanova.

Dark triad

Incels claim that women like men with high scores in Dark Triad traits. This is one of many talking points where incels demonstrate their bias and stubbornly ignore the methodological problems of studies they’re using.

The first methodological issue: The link between attractive facial features and DT traits is weak and partial, there is only limited confirmation for the link with narcissism, but not for Machiavellianism or psychopathy.

Shiramizu V. K. M. et al. 2019

The second methodological issue: Most studies use self-reports to form pools of individuals with DT traits, i.e. in the testing set they include photos of the people identified as carriers of the DT traits according to their results to questionnaire. This approach looks dubious. It is recommended to include assessments of others (relatives, close friends) to accurately determine the presence of the DT.

Muris et. al. 2017

The third methodological issue: most studies view narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism as unidimensional constructs, although there is evidence that they are multidimensional.

Miller et. al. 2019

Broken down into components, some traits have correlation with attractiveness, while others have no correlation or inverse correlation. For example, agentic narcissism is correlated with attractiveness, but antagonistic narcissism is not.

The fourth methodological problem: we can put forward hypotheses about the biological origin of the alleged attraction to the DT only when this attraction is manifested in a universal way for all human cultures and societies. And since such studies have simply not been conducted in non-Westernized societies, we cannot argue about the influence of biology and not culture. I have repeatedly emphasized the importance of these studies [“Problems of evolutionary psychology”, “On the gender difference in risk taking”, “On the gender difference in competitiveness”]. Without them, all evolutionary hypotheses cited by incels are nothing more than speculation. For example, the hunter-gatherer hypothesis: They argue that females choose “dominant males” “to gain access to high quality food and resources (Geary 2004)”. But among hunter-gatherers, everyone gets food equally, there is no special nutritional benefit for the best hunter’s woman, unless the hunters themselves eat slightly better than women (Stibbard-Hawkes et. al. 2020).

Such speculations constitute the majority of evolutionary psychological hypotheses that are not based on empirical data from non-Westernized communities.

These are not all methodological problems - some will be revealed when we talk about the attractiveness or unattractiveness of masculinized faces

.Cherry-picking

Incels also ignore the fact that DT attractiveness studies have highly controversial results. They do not cite studies that didn’t find the link between DT facial features and attractiveness. Moreover, there are evidences that these traits cause disgust.

One: Brewer, Gayle, et al. (2018)

Two: Lyons, Minna, and Louise Simeonov 2016

Three: Solomon, E., & Lyons, M. (2020)

That’s an example of banal cherry-picking.

Considering studies using vignettes (textual descriptions of people with high and low DR traits) they cite the study (Carter, G. L et al. 2014), where the researches found the link between attractiveness and high scores for DT traits, but they ignore another study Qureshi et al. (2016), which has a bigger sample and shows that people with high DT traits scores aren’t more attractive than people with lower DT traits scores. There’s also another ignored work Salvino, M. A. (2018), which found out that narcissism is attractive both for men and women in contrast to psychopathy or Machiavellianism.

They also cite (Brazil, K. J., & Forth, A. E. (2020), but forget about Jauk et al. 2016 where only narcissism remains a significant predictor of mate choice, while psychopathy after controlling for physical attractiveness is not one and Machiavellianism has inverse correlation. As I noted earlier both studies suffer from a serious methodological flaw – low statistical power. How to correctly (and not selectively) quote, you can see in my other article.

Conclusion

From all cited studies and criticism of methodology, we can conclude that there is no strong evidence for the greater attractiveness of people with high DT scores. Narcissism might slightly correlate with attractiveness, but not to the point of monstrous d=0.94 given by incels.