Manosphere members score high on evolution science literacy, survey finds

Members of the online antifeminist communities known collectively as the manosphere are not only enthusiastic about evolutionary science—they also know it better than a comparable sample of the general US public, according to the first survey study to measure scientific literacy across these groups. The exploratory study, published in the journal Developmental Biology Advances, found that English-speaking manosphere respondents answered 70.4 percent of questions on a 20-item science questionnaire correctly, compared with 50.5 percent among a counterpart group of US respondents recruited through the survey platform Prolific.

The research was motivated by growing concern among evolutionary scientists that their findings are being politically weaponized by lay communities online. While appropriations of genetics research by white supremacists have drawn attention, the manosphere—a loose collection of antifeminist men’s groups including Men’s Rights Activists, Pickup-Artists, The Red Pill, Men Going Their Own Way, and incels—has gravitated particularly toward evolutionary psychology. These communities favor evolutionary models of sexual selection to explain behavioral sex differences in humans, and they consume vast amounts of evolutionary scientific literature, citing it on platforms such as the incel wiki, which contains hundreds of references to peer-reviewed papers.

Previous criticism of manosphere science has been largely qualitative. Scholars have described a “turbocharged genetic determinism” in manosphere ideology that ignores the interplay between genetic and environmental factors, and have identified recurring misconceptions such as the exaggeration of evolved sex differences into categorical essentialist categories—a bias the researchers call “sex differentialism.” But until now, no empirical assessment of the scientific literacy and knowledge-acquisition practices of these groups had been conducted.

To fill that gap, researchers designed a 20-item multiple-choice questionnaire drawing on pre-existing validated instruments where possible, covering five areas relevant to the evolutionary behavioral sciences: endocrinology, genetics, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and general scientific literacy. Items came from instruments including the Genetics Literacy Assessment Instrument, the Conceptual Inventory of Natural Selection, and the Test of Scientific Literacy Skills. Because no validated undergraduate-level evolutionary psychology questionnaire existed, the team designed their own items, seeding them with “distractors”—false answers reflecting common misconceptions—to measure the prevalence of five specific errors: extreme environmentalism, extreme biological determinism, the intentionalistic fallacy, sex differentialism, and species selection.

Recruiting respondents from these suspicious, anonymous communities proved difficult. The researchers created study-specific accounts across a wide array of platforms, sought moderator permission on forums, Discord servers and subreddits, and promoted the survey on social media sites including X, Gab and Parler. Data collection was slow, marked by refusals and hostile reactions, and the team could not reach Facebook or Instagram audiences. Of 417 answers collected over eight months between November 2022 and July 2023, filtering for incomplete responses and self-identified manosphere membership left 148 analyzable surveys. A comparison group of 151 US respondents was recruited on Prolific, balanced between men and women, with a minimum 95 percent approval rate on the platform.

The results were striking. Acceptance of evolution among manosphere respondents was almost unanimous, significantly exceeding even the counterpart group’s acceptance and far above the baseline measured for the US population with the same question. On the science questionnaire, manosphere respondents averaged 14.07 correct answers out of 20, against 10.13 for the counterpart group—a difference that was highly significant in an independent samples t-test. In a linear regression controlling for age, gender, educational achievement, number of college science courses, and acceptance of evolution, manosphere membership was by far the strongest predictor of questionnaire success, with these respondents scoring more than four points higher than counterparts when all other factors were held equal.

The survey also revealed distinctive patterns in how manosphere members acquire and transmit scientific knowledge. Respondents rated how much they learned about science from eight types of media on a seven-point scale. Wikipedia and peer-reviewed scientific papers tied for first place in manosphere ratings, followed by videos and online discussions—while manosphere-specific content ranked last. The prominence of peer-reviewed papers stood in stark contrast to the counterpart group, which ranked them sixth out of seven. Manosphere respondents also reported sharing scientific content on social media, citing scientific data to prove points, and discussing scientific theories at significantly higher rates than the comparison sample, suggesting that scientific research functions as a “prized epistemic currency” in these spaces, often invoked to win arguments.

On misconceptions, the most prevalent among manosphere respondents was the intentionalistic fallacy—the belief that organisms consciously act to maximize their Darwinian fitness. The researchers explain that while people possess psychological mechanisms, such as emotions and preferences, that were naturally selected because they helped ancestors reproduce, this does not mean individuals consciously run Darwinian calculations. In incel ideology, this fallacy manifests in accusations that women are modern-day eugenicists who purposefully aim to eradicate short or non-masculine men from the gene pool. Notably, this was the only misconception positively associated with acquiring science knowledge from manosphere sources, while consumption of mainstream science media was generally associated with lower misconception prevalence—most strongly for extreme environmentalism, or the “blank slate” view of the human mind.

The authors caution that their findings carry important limitations. Respondents were recruited voluntarily, meaning the most hostile and mistrustful community members probably did not participate, and the survey was only posted on platforms whose administrators consented—a case of gatekeeper bias. The lengthy questionnaire likely attracted people already more interested in science than average, and the advertisement inviting people to test their scientific knowledge may have appealed disproportionately to the science-curious. As a remotely administered survey, there is no way to guarantee the absence of cheating or disingenuous answers. Random probability sampling is impossible with such hard-to-reach populations, the researchers note, calling for a high level of caution when generalizing, and emphasizing that replication with larger samples and more hostile segments of the manosphere would be necessary.

Nevertheless, the study’s implications are provocative. Manosphere respondents reported relatively high educational levels, including scientific higher education, and their evolutionary scientific literacy was far above average. This suggests that laypeople who appropriate research in ways scientists disapprove of may not be guided by misunderstanding, but by values, ideologies, and agendas. If so, the impact of scientific education and outreach—which primarily improves understanding—may be limited, and the problem enters the domain of ethics rather than epistemics. With open-access publishing and services such as Sci-Hub making nearly all scholarly literature freely available, and even preprints widely shared by non-scientists on social media, the researchers argue that scientists writing on controversial topics liable to political weaponization, such as genetic differences between populations or between the sexes, can no longer assume they are writing only for colleagues. The findings, the authors conclude, should serve as a springboard for renewed discussion within fields working on politicized issues, and a call for evidence-based assessment of the social and ideological impacts of research findings.

Subject of Research: Scientific literacy, evolution acceptance, and knowledge acquisition practices among online manosphere communities

Article Title: Evolution acceptance, literacy, and knowledge acquisition among online manosphere communities: an exploratory survey study

Article References: Bachaud, L., & Gauchon, R. (2026). Evolution acceptance, literacy, and knowledge acquisition among online manosphere communities: an exploratory survey study. Developmental Biology Advances, 17(1), Article 9. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13227-026-00262-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13227-026-00262-0

Keywords: manosphere, evolution acceptance, scientific literacy, evolutionary psychology, incels, science communication, survey study, misconceptions, peer-reviewed literature, online communities, knowledge acquisition, Evolution