Shame, hostile affect, and violent glorification in incel discourse: a stratified manual-coding study of pre-ban r/incels, 2014 to 2017

This preregistered study asks whether shame-consistent discourse predicts violent-glorification discourse in incel forum posts. The SHAME framework (Scheel, C. N., Eisenbarth, H., & Rentzsch, K. (2020). Assessment of different dimensions of shame proneness: Validation of the SHAME. Assessment, 27(8), 1699–1717) was applied to a stratified sample of 1199 posts drawn from 660,993 eligible posts in the pre-ban r/Incels Reddit corpus, covering 2014–2017 (Golbeck, J. (2024). A dataset for the study of online radicalization through incel forum archives. Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, 4). Each post was manually coded for existential, bodily, and cognitive shame; hostile affect; anger restrictive; and violent glorification. The three shame dimensions were empirically separable (maximum phi = .113). Contrary to H2, existential shame negatively predicted violent glorification in the primary model (OR = 0.31, 95% CI [0.06, 0.66]). Hostile affect was the only reliable positive predictor (OR = 3.18, 95% CI [2.11, 4.95]). H3 was supported: neither bodily nor cognitive shame, operationalised as discourse-marker codes, positively predicted violent glorification, and both showed negative associations. Inter-coder reliability exceeded the preregistered .60 threshold on the five constructs with positive cases (kappas .935–1.000). The findings suggest that violent glorification at the post level is an expression of outward-directed hostile affect, not a concurrent expression of shame. The post is also the unit of text to which language-based threat-assessment measures are applied. Sequential shame-to-hostility pathways require longitudinal data.