2.1. Case studies on key manosphere just-so stories

As data analysis progressed, it became clear that the manosphere was producing its own evolutionary speculations. Some just-so stories in particular were foundational to their community’s ideology and constantly invoked, discussed, and refined. To illustrate this collective dimension of manosphere evolutionary storytelling, two foundational JSSs were selected as case studies, that is, those on the evolution of ‘approach anxiety’ and ‘shit tests’. They were thoroughly analysed and compared to the relevant academic literature.

2.2. Systematic review of manosphere just-so stories

To shed light on the unique phenomenon of manosphere evolutionary storytelling, we also effected a systematic review of all JSSs found in the corpus. However, based on our definition of JSS, identification was extremely difficult, as distinguishing existing hypotheses from lay-made JSSs requires exhaustive knowledge of evolutionary literature, which no individual presumably possesses. To address that issue, a three-step selection process was put in place.

First, the first author reviewed the entire discourse corpus, and extracted all the hypotheses that they did not recognize from the literature. Several criteria were adopted: the potential JSS should concern human evolution and behaviour, it should specifically include Darwinian reasoning (e.g. fitness, competition, selection, genes). Statements such as ‘Evolution made it that way’ or ‘that’s just evolution’ were therefore not included. When several occurrences of the same JSS were present in the corpus, it was counted as one, the goal being to review the contents of manosphere JSSs rather than their frequency or popularity. One hundred and twenty presumable JSSs were thus identified. For practicality and ease of comprehension (the manosphere has its own jargon, see Farrell et al., Reference Farrell, Araque, Fernandez and Alani2020), those were reformulated in more concise and scientific terms, recapitulating the core content of the JSS: which trait evolved and why (see recapitulated dataset in Supplementary Material S7).

Then, this preliminary dataset was reviewed by the other authors. Any hypothesis that they recognized from the literature was dismissed. When manosphere discourse resembled established hypotheses, it was determined on a case-by-case basis whether it differed from the literature, that is, whether the adaptation and/or evolutionary trajectory hypothesized were substantially different. As a result, 18 hypotheses were dismissed, leaving 102 presumable just-so stories.

Finally, analyses of the preliminary dataset were presented at the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association (EHBEA) yearly conference in Montpellier, on 19 April 2024. At the end of the presentation, the evolutionary scholars in the audience were asked for help. They were given a QR code directing to the dataset and were asked to browse it and signal hypotheses they recognized from the literature. No additional hypotheses were dismissed as a result of this procedure (this three-step selection process is summarized in Supplementary Material S8). Thus, our dataset of 102 manosphere-made just-so stories was compiled. This is one of the major contributions of this study, as to our knowledge this is the first dataset of the kind. The original anonymized manosphere materials containing the JSSs are available in Supplementary Material S6, and the recapitulated spreadsheet dataset can be found in Supplementary Material S7.

Using both the original excerpts and the recapitulated dataset, the first and third authors then blindly coded each JSS for three binary criteria: evolved sex difference (1 = Yes, 0 = No); discursive marks of hypothesis (1 = Yes; 0 = No); and sexual selection (1 = Yes; 0 = No). To ensure that they were working with the same definitions, the first author provided a coding manual (reproduced in Supplementary Material S9). The second author then computed the Cohen’s Kappa interrater reliability statistic. Cases with coding disagreements were reconciled by the first and third authors on a case-by-case basis, until final percentages were reached (see Supplementary Material S10 for complete coding details). Finally, for comparison, a dataset of evolutionary hypotheses from the latest evolutionary psychology textbook was retrieved and coded by the first author only (Buss, Reference Buss2024). No independent coding was deemed necessary because the hypotheses formulated in the textbook are unambiguously worded compared to lay just-so stories (see Supplementary Material S11 for procedure and dataset).

3.1. Approach anxiety: a case of collaborative, bottom-up, lay hypothesizing

In his EP textbook, David Buss describes the ‘bottom-up’ (sometimes also called ‘observation-driven’) approach to evolutionary hypothesizing, which starts with everyday observations. ‘Once the observation is made about the existence of a phenomenon’, he explains, ‘we can then proceed in a bottom-up fashion and generate a hypothesis about its function’ (Buss, Reference Buss2024). In bottom-up fashion, manosphere just-so stories often stem from everyday observations and experiences. This is manifest in PUAs’ fascination for what they call ‘approach anxiety’ and the way they speculate about it. Pickup-Artists or members of the ‘seduction community’ dedicate themselves to creating and applying conversational, behavioural, and lifestyle techniques to seduce heterosexual women. This community has a strong commercial nature, with the most influential PUAs offering paid tutoring sessions, group seminars, and selling dating guides (scholars have called it a ‘community-industry’: O’Neill, Reference O’Neill2015).

In most PUA dating guidelines, the first step is usually called ‘approaching’, that is, going up to initiate conversation with a woman. However, most aspiring PUAs report extreme nervousness and anxiety during the approach. This ‘approach anxiety’ is one of the most discussed topics in PUA forums and guides. Year after year, newcomers to the community ask their more experienced peers about ways to circumvent this crushing nervosity. In one of the most influential dating guides of the community, the Venusian Arts Handbook, dating coach Erik Von Markovik, best known by the pseudonym ‘Mystery’, laid out his canonical JSS to explain the evolution of approach anxiety (JSS#29):

With no mark of hypothesis, nor any empirical test, Mystery thus confidently declares that approach anxiety is a male-specific adaptation that arose to answer two distinct selective pressures: loss of reputational status incurred by female rejection in small-scale mating environments and potential harm caused by another male’s mate guarding. Mystery believes this adaptation to be male-specific, arguing that ‘[m]en take a larger risk than women when first approaching. In ancient times, this posed a legitimate safety concern and thus men still experience approach anxiety’ (Mystery, 2007). Even if he does not use the term, he argues that this adaptation is an evolutionary mismatch in today’s Western dating world: ‘Logically, of course, modern society fixes these problems. If I am rejected, I can simply go to another part of the bar, or leave the bar entirely. I will probably never see any of those people again. But my emotions don’t know that. My emotions are trying to do what’s best for me’ (Mystery, 2007). This has great motivational value for readers of the Venusian Arts Handbook: their anxiety is depicted as the dysfunctional emotional legacy of a distant past that should be disregarded and overridden.

For years, this JSS remained a canonical feature of PUA guides and theories, and approach anxiety became a ubiquitous phrase in their discussions. Over time, it was collaboratively extended, refined, or challenged by the community. In fact, almost all its features have been criticized by other PUAs. For example, one argues that women experience even more approach anxiety than men (JSS#32): ‘I think that women have much stronger rejection anxiety than men do, which is why society has evolved such that men always have to approach’ (PUA, Reddit, 2016).

Others argue that approach anxiety is not a specific mating-related adaptation, but just caused by a generic fear of rejection (JSS#31):

Another PUA Redditor concurs and says that ‘Mystery’s theory is way to specific and complicated and acts like AA [approach anxiety] is some kind of unique mechanism’, while to him, ‘it seems far more likely […] that trying hitting on a girl is a situation that tends to bring out common anxieties like a fear of (any kind of) rejection’ (PUA, Reddit, 2015).

A member of the Red Pill community (a more politicized offshoot of the seduction community; see definition in Supplementary Material S1) argues that approach anxiety is actually a by-product of another psychological adaptation, coming from infants’ fear of separation from their mothers (JSS#55):

Lastly, some PUAs question the adaptive approach altogether. One argues that Mystery misrepresents the selective pressures at work in ancestral environments:

1. 1. You won’t get kicked out of the tribe that easily. Think of the times you upset your parents/family. Most likely you weren’t banned from seeing them.

2. 2. Relationships/marriage were most likely arranged by the family or forced onto the woman. There was no need to cold approach and build attraction” (PUA, Reddit, 2017).

He therefore concludes that ‘AA comes from modern social conditioning. It’s not a natural thing’ (PUA, Reddit, 2017). Another Redditor also ridicules Mystery’s ‘baseless theory’: ‘It’s kind of like if he said: the reason job interviews make people nervous is that in caveman times if you tried to take someone else’s role/job in the tribe and did a worse job than them, you’d be killed by your community’ (PUA, Forum, 2015).

Mostly unbeknownst to the EP academic community, online groups of laypeople have for almost two decades been debating adaptive accounts for the evolution of approach anxiety. Fundamentally, their discussions have much in common with everyday debates among evolutionary scholars: is the mechanism domain-specific or domain-generic? Is it sex differentiated? What were the ancestral selective pressures? Could it not be a by-product? Is it an adaptation at all? The main difference, which is of course epistemologically crucial, is the absence of empirical tests, and of non-anecdotal evidence. Although the bottom-up approach to evolutionary hypothesizing is recognized as a perfectly legitimate scientific method (Buss, Reference Buss2024), its proponents acknowledge that it should not stop at speculating about an observed behaviour’s function: ‘The bottom-up approach is completed when – and only when – the researcher then “turns around” and generates novel testable predictions based on this hypothesized psychological mechanism’ (Lewis et al., Reference Lewis, Al-Shawaf, Conroy-Beam, Asao and Buss2017). Thus, manosphere JSSs fall short of the standards of adaptationist bottom-up hypothesizing. However, the example of approach anxiety shows that the manosphere does not solely interpret and distort existing scholarship but also produces and maintains its own autonomous pseudo-Darwinian body of knowledge on specific issues, as further shown by the ‘shit test’ just-so story.

3.2. Shit tests: male-biased evolutionary just-so storytelling

The concept of ‘shit test’ is a cornerstone of the Red Pill view of female behaviour, underpinned by a speculative evolutionary narrative (JSS#45). In the context of heterosexual mating, shit tests are thought to be a woman’s way of evaluating a man’s mate value, as explained in this Reddit guide:

There is a remarkable consensus among Red Pillers about the adaptive function of these tests, which are sometimes called ‘fitness tests’, making their Darwinian-inspired nature even clearer. These ‘tests’ are supposed to gauge a man’s confidence, dominance, and resourcefulness, and thus, his suitability as a mate. This being the ultimate function of the behaviour, it does not have to be conscious, Red Pill ideologue Rollo Tomassi argues:

Surveying Red Pill texts, it seems that just about any statement or action directed by a woman towards a man in a context of heterosexual mating can be construed as a shit test. Very conveniently, Red Pillers use the supposed ultimate function of these tests to advise men to disregard anything women might say. Indeed, because shit tests are thought to be unconscious testing devices, their discursive content does not matter, only men’s reactions to them do. Thus, Red Pillers invariably recommend not to take shit tests seriously.

In fact, the best way to ‘pass’ them is usually to ignore them: ‘never forget that a shit test can be passed by literally any response which shows that you are not rattled’ (TRP, Reddit, 2018). As with the approach anxiety JSSs review above, practical advice usually follows the formulation of the evolutionary story. Let us consider such advice from a Red Pill Reddit guide entitled ‘Everything you need to know about shit tests’:

Evidently, Red Pillers tell men not to take what women say seriously. Even factual statements such as ‘I have a boyfriend’, which could be assumed to show a lack of sexual interest, are assumed to be false, and interpreted as invitations to ‘try harder’. Thanks to the evolutionary rationale behind the shit test concept, Red Pillers pose as authorities on female behaviour and tell their thousands of male readers to constantly disregard women’s words and concerns. In fact, according to them, this is exactly what women ultimately desire, as argued by Rollo Tomassi: ‘Women want to be told “No”, and constantly test a man’s resolve to say this to her (a.k.a. shit testing) in order to affirm that she’s made the right choice’ (Tomassi, Reference Tomassi2013). This is a typical manosphere JSS: there are no marks of hypothesis, nor any non-anecdotal empirical evidence.

It is quite obvious that this JSS was devised by men. Indeed, nothing in sexual selection theory dictates that only women would be interested in evaluating a mate’s suitability (for a sex-neutral explanation of similar phenomena, see Zahavi, Reference Zahavi1977). In fact, selecting a mate with a suitable attributes should have massive fitness benefits for both sexes (Buss, Reference Buss2024; Stewart-Williams & Thomas, Reference Stewart-Williams and Thomas2013). Following the Red Pill’s evolutionary reasoning, it seems quite unlikely that only women would have evolved psychological mechanisms to address this selective pressure. A second issue is that of demarcation: what exactly is a ‘shit test’? In Red Pill writings, the definition seems infinitely flexible, as any complaint or challenge can be framed as a shit test:

With so wide an application, the very concept of a simple, punctual ‘test’ loses most of its meaning. It seems more plausible that individuals (not just women) constantly assess others’ suitability as mates by considering the totality of their words and actions. If one were to imagine a serious (i.e. non-gender-biased and empirical) adaptationist research programme on ‘shit tests’, it would thus bear little resemblance to the Red Pill JSS. Such a programme would explore the conscious and unconscious cues people process to evaluate a mate’s character and suitability for a relationship. It might also investigate when and why individuals engage in behaviours designed to elicit specific responses from a potential partner, such as seeking reassurance about their interest or commitment. Many of the ‘shit tests’ described by Red Pill adherents appear to arise from genuine feelings of anxiety or concern. However, the Red Pill’s default response is to suggest that a woman’s anxiety can only be alleviated through dishonesty, aloofness, and dominance, as a way to unconsciously ‘reassure’ her of one’s fitness.

Although this approach may be effective in some contexts, this should be empirically demonstrated, and is likely influenced by factors such as personality, context, and relationship dynamics. Setting ethical considerations aside, significant cross-cultural evidence indicates that honesty and understanding are highly valued traits in a partner (Eastwick et al., Reference Eastwick, Sparks, Finkel, Meza, Adamkovič, Adu, Ai, Akintola, Al-Shawaf, Apriliawati, Arriaga, Aubert-Teillaud, Baník, Barzykowski, Batres, Baucom, Beaulieu, Behnke, Butcher and Coles2025). This suggests that, more often than not, the most effective way to reassure a current or prospective partner may simply be to sincerely address their concerns, rather than dismissing them in the playful manner promoted by Red Pill advocates.

5.1. Implications for the evolutionary science community

In manosphere discourse, JSSs seamlessly mingle with legitimate hypotheses from the literature. Considering how challenging it was, even for three evolutionary scholars, to identify and separate manosphere-made JSSs from published hypotheses (see Methods section), this task cannot be expected of any layperson browsing the manosphere. As a consequence, people encountering manosphere discourse might equate it with evolutionary behavioural sciences in general.

This risk is accentuated by the propensity of manospherians to cite peer-reviewed articles, even though those do not test for the specific JSSs they forward. See for example JSS#77, found on the incel’s own wiki platform (for analysis of incels.wiki, see Roser et al., Reference Roser, Chalker and Squirrell2023). Summarizing a study that found that vegetarian men are perceived by women as less attractive (Timeo & Suitner, Reference Timeo and Suitner2018), curators of the incel wiki explain that this female preference might have been selected because of the nutritiousness of meat brought by male hunters over evolutionary history (‘Scientific Blackpill’, n.d.). Yet, they do not signal that this evolutionary hypothesis does not feature in the study they cite (which focuses on the masculine gender role): it is a just-so story.

This use of scientific citations undoubtedly grants credibility to manosphere ideas, as explained by a former Red Piller to a British newspaper: ‘The movement’s use of evolutionary psychology convinced my rational mind that everything I read was a scientific fact suppressed by feminists’ (Tait, Reference Tait2017). Whether one is an enthusiast or a critic of the manosphere, a partial glance at manosphere content suffices to equate manosphere ideology with evolutionary psychology, a confusion encouraged by manospherians themselves. For example, incels.wiki features a page called ‘The Scientific Blackpill’, which makes heavy use of academic citations, and is framed as a literature review of EP: ‘The Scientific Blackpill is about understanding the nature of human social and sexual behaviour with a particular focus on evolutionary psychological perspectives’ (‘Scientific Blackpill’, n.d.).

More worrisome for the field’s reputation is the fact that other scholars studying the manosphere also make that equation between academic EP and manosphere ideology. For example, in a 2018 critique of the Red Pill’s main’s subreddit (r/TheRedPill), sociologist Shawn van Valkenburg argues that Red Pill ideology ‘faithfully incorporates contemporary EP literature into its philosophy’, and calls for critical investigation of ‘the extent to which a branch of academia is implicated in r/TRP’s construction’ (Van Valkenburgh, Reference Van Valkenburgh2018; for a critical investigation of Van Valkenburgh’s claims, see Bachaud, Reference Bachaud2025, p. 386).

Although recent analyses from within have concluded that evolutionary psychology has entered a mature phase of Kuhnian ‘normal science’ (Barrett, Reference Barrett2020), the field remains contested and controversial (see O’Neill, Reference O’Neill2016). The existence of an alternative and unsubstantiated body of EP-like analyses is bound to stoke these controversies, especially considering the wide circulation of manosphere discourse. For example, Mystery and his JSSs are given pride of place in the bestselling memoir The Game (Strauss, Reference Strauss2005), while Rollo Tomassi has been popularizing the notion of shit tests and other JSSs through his successful Rational Male book series (Tomassi, Reference Tomassi2013, Reference Tomassi2015, Reference Tomassi2017).

Beyond those reputational stakes for EP as an academic discipline, there is evidence that these JSSs have a concrete impact on the behaviour of their adherents. This is revealed by Neil Strauss’s book The Game, where he recounts his life with dating coach Mystery, arguably the most influential popularizer of Darwinism in the manosphere. Strauss recalls that evolutionary psychology stoked Mystery’s jealousy towards his ex-partner’s new boyfriend, giving ‘an intellectual justification for his antisocial emotions and his desire to harm the organism that had mated with his woman’ (Strauss, Reference Strauss2005). When his friends attempted to get a depressed Mystery into therapy, Strauss recalls, they were ‘dismissed with a long-winded explanation of how his [Mystery’s] emotions and actions were evolutionarily justified’. In her ethnographic immersion among the London PUA community, sociologist Rachel O’Neill was in fact struck by the ‘frequency and ease’ with which evolutionary ‘imperatives’ were invoked by her interviewees: ‘Those who employed this repertoire were utterly convinced of their own evolutionarily ordained need for sex and felt compelled to explain why they and other men must conduct their intimate lives in accordance with such biological dictates’, she wrote (O’Neill, Reference O’Neill2018).

These examples reflect the naturalistic fallacy, the moral justification of an action because it is seen as ‘natural’ and biologically determined. Evolutionary psychologists have repeatedly criticized this fallacy, arguing that no moral judgement should be derived from the adaptive nature of a given trait or behaviour (Pinker, Reference Pinker1997, Reference Pinker2002). Anyone familiar with EP literature is bound to have encountered warnings about this fallacy. However, justifications for behaviour in the manosphere seem to be opportunistic and motivated rather than simply guided by the sole belief that what is ‘natural’ is intrinsically desirable. In fact, when alleged evolved psychological mechanisms are seen as undesirable, as in the case of approach anxiety, then manosphere writers tell their readers to go ‘against their nature’ (e.g. Mystery, 2007). What seems to matter most here is whether the action is seen as desirable or expedient in the first place, which then receives post hoc justifications that either commit the naturalistic fallacy (e.g. in the case of Mystery’s personal conduct) or not (e.g. in the case of approach anxiety).

Our examination of the approach anxiety and shit test JSSs reveals that evolutionary storytelling in the manosphere is often a prelude to prescriptive behavioural and lifestyle advice. Given the content of those JSSs, one might reasonably expect this advice to have harmful consequences for women’s autonomy and sexual consent. While evolutionary scholars cannot be held responsible for these behaviours, they are uniquely poised to address this conundrum. First, as experts on academic literature, they are the most qualified to help separate legitimate empirical research from unsubstantiated storytelling, which is one of the main achievements of the present study. Second, because they know how serious adaptationist thinking and research should be conducted, they are capable of identifying gender-biased pseudoscience, as shown by our critique of the ‘shit test’ JSS. Lastly, evolutionary scholars working on human behaviour are also used to the statistical, ethical, and epistemological implications of evolutionary behavioural research, such as the reminders that mean tendencies do not necessarily allow for inference on individual cases, that explaining is not justifying, and that normative judgements should not be derived from the fact that something is an adaptation – reminders that are often absent from the manosphere avatar of EP.

There has recently been a nascent trend in science popularizers and professionals critically comparing manosphere beliefs to academic literature (e.g. Alexander, 2022, 2023; Bachaud, Reference Bachaud2025; Bachaud & Johns, Reference Bachaud and Johns2023; Baselice, Reference Baselice2023; Conroy-Beam, Reference Conroy-Beam2024). In the book Hack Your Mating: An Evolutionary Psychologist’s Guide to a Life of Sexual Abundance, evolutionary scholar Antonios Vakirtzis provides his own prescriptive dating advice based on EP (Reference Vakirtzis2018). Interestingly, he addresses ‘approach anxiety’, a concept coming from Pickup-Artist literature, and expresses surprise ‘that behavioral scientists, and particularly evolutionary psychologists, have not bothered with the topic’ (Vakirtzis, Reference Vakirtzis2018). Then, he goes on to provide his own hypothesis about approach anxiety. To him, ‘approaching’ an unknown woman triggers mechanisms that evolved to prevent ancestral men from courting outgroup women, which he argues was more costly and dangerous than courting ingroup women. However, without empirical tests nor peer review for this hypothesis this is yet another just-so story. This example shows that manosphere JSSs can provide a source of inspiration for evolutionary scholars, something we discuss next.

Our manosphere JSS dataset contains 102 evolutionary hypotheses. Note that we did not attempt to evaluate the likelihood that these were in any way valid, which would require designing and conducting hundreds of specific empirical studies. This raises the question: should evolutionary psychologists in fact rigorously test the hypotheses forwarded by manospherians in an attempt to falsify them? On an epistemological level, the value of a hypothesis should not be judged by its origin, but by its resistance to falsification attempts (Popper, Reference Popper1959). Therefore, there is no fundamental issue with having some of these JSSs being empirically tested by professionals. However, there are two potential risks in pursuing this avenue further. First, scientists’ time and resources are limited. We can doubt whether the best use of that time is to investigate hypotheses whose proponents exhibit such blatant gender biases and motivated thinking. Lastly, given the reputational risks discussed above, evolutionary scholars might want to avoid giving the impression that the manosphere is setting their research agenda.

Paradoxically, hypothesis generation is rarely discussed among evolutionary scholars, even though it is one of the most distinctive features of the field (guidelines are available, e.g. Lewis et al., Reference Lewis, Al-Shawaf, Conroy-Beam, Asao and Buss2017; Hunt & Jaeggi, Reference Hunt and Jaeggi2025, but it remains to be seen how often these are followed). There are countless seminars on research methods or ethics, but relatively little attention is paid to training new scholars for rigorous adaptationist hypothesis generation. Maybe because this is a creative activity, which is implicitly assumed to be less prone to standardization and should be left to individuals. Anthropologist Martha McCaughey also argues that evolutionary reasoning is simply ‘fun’ and ‘can be a satisfying intellectual exercise’ (McCaughey, Reference McCaughey2008).

The creativity and enthusiasm of manospherians for evolutionary explanations reveal that this satisfaction is not limited to professional scientists. Given this evidence that anyone can formulate an evolutionary story about anything, scientific adaptationism needs to clearly demarcate itself from lay evolutionism. By being honest about the research process and always carefully signalling hypotheses as such, by avoiding cavalier and overconfident statements about evolution of human behaviour, and more importantly by engaging in collective reflection, exchange, and training on hypothesis generation, evolutionary scholars would both distance themselves from lay pseudo-Darwinian speculations and make their science better.

5.2. Limitations and future research

As reflected in this paper’s title, this research should be considered exploratory, as there was no prior existing scholarship on this specific type of object: lay evolutionary hypotheses. Moreover, the manosphere data for this study were extremely noisy and heterogeneous, ranging from casual Reddit conversations to book-length exposés. In the process of reformulating these into a more manageable form, myriads of somewhat arbitrary linguistic decisions had to be made. Likewise, in the selection process, some judgement calls had to be made whereby genuine JSSs might have been discarded because they closely resembled peer-reviewed and published hypotheses (i.e. false negatives).

Although we strove to be thorough, it is also possible that at least a few of the JSSs in our dataset were mislabelled as just-so stories, and that they are in fact peer-reviewed and published hypotheses (i.e. false positives). Theoretically speaking, it is simply impossible to prove that something has never been published (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence). We hope that the publication of this dataset will pique the curiosity of other evolutionary scholars, who might in turn recognize some hypotheses therein (Supplementary Material S7). If so, we kindly encourage them to signal this to the corresponding author. Ultimately, our definition of JSS was meant as an operational definition for the needs of the empirical study, but the issue of delineating scientific from non-scientific content is an enduring conundrum in philosophy of science, which cannot be expected to be ‘solved’ anytime soon, if ever.

The present study revealed the propensity of manospherians to engage in evolutionary hypothesizing. Yet, three important dimensions of the phenomenon cannot be evaluated through discourse analysis alone. The first one concerns the process of hypothesis generation and could be investigated by interviewing manosphere content creators (such as Mystery, whom we failed to reach for an interview). Are those JSSs even consciously devised as such, or are they unconscious deformations of academic hypotheses? What evidence do manospherians browse before forwarding them? How does scientific knowledge circulate in these communities? And so on.

A second key dimension is the extent to which these JSSs are taken seriously. For all we know, given the common lack of marks of hypothesis, some of these JSSs might not be considered hypothetical at all. It does seem that their most adamant popularizers, such as Mystery, really believe in the evolutionary stories they tell. On the other hand, some manospherians are more critical, such as the Redditor who reminded others that approach anxiety was just ‘a theory pick up artists invented based on zero evidence’ (PUA, Reddit, 2017). It would therefore be necessary to evaluate manospherians’ intuitive feelings of certainty (FOC) about their just-so stories, and whether this certainty could be affected by debunking attempts from evolutionary psychologists. As shown by research in science education, FOC can indeed have an influence on the acceptance of given scientific beliefs, potentially explaining why some people with relatively high science literacy refuse to accept evolutionary theory (Ha et al., Reference Ha, Haury and Nehm2012).

Lastly is the most crucial element to investigate. Does adherence to these stories about the evolution of sex differences really impact these men’s actions, in particular towards women? Qualitative ethnographic evidence seems to suggest so, but experimental designs are necessary to cement this claim. Unfortunately, manospherians tend to be extremely hostile towards academia (Sugiura, Reference Sugiura, Lavorgna and Holt2021), and no experiments have ever been conducted on this population, to the best of our knowledge. Through priming and vignettes, studies have investigated potential inferences and normative judgments triggered by evolutionary explanations for behaviour. Dar‐Nimrod et al. (Reference Dar‐Nimrod, Heine, Cheung and Schaller2011) found that reading evolutionary explanations for sex crimes did not make respondents more acceptant of these crimes, whereas sociocultural explanations made participants more condemnatory and punitive. Nettle et al. (Reference Nettle, Frankenhuis and Panchanathan2023) found that non-experts tend to make an incorrect inference: when they are presented with biological explanation for behaviour, they intuitively assume it is less malleable than behaviour explained through psychological or sociocultural factors. Such designs could be adapted to identify links between beliefs and behaviour among manospherians, for example by assessing whether exposure to gender-biased JSSs triggers changes in attitude towards women.