Psychology Today posts racist article: Why black women are less attractive?!?!?!?

[atomiczombie]

I could hardly believe this when I read it:

You would think someone with a job title like “evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics” would use their intelligence and training to try and solve life’s great mysteries. But Satoshi Kanazawa, who has such a title, just wrote an article called Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women, But Black Men Are Rated Better Looking Than Other Men? The article, billed early on as racist hogwash, got so much negative attention when it was posted Sunday on Psychology Today that it had been taken down by Monday afternoon. (You can see screenshots of it at BuzzFeed.)
Kanazawa, who wrote the article for The Scientific Fundamentalist blog he keeps for Psychology Today, posited that there are “marked race differences in physical attractiveness among women, but not among men,” and then set out on a hunt for an answer as to why that is.
His study used data collected by three interviewers who rated the hotness of a group of people on three occasions over the course of seven years. Then that data was then, somehow, forced into objectivity using factor analysis, a statistical procedure normally used to eradicate errors in variables measured in actual quantities, like number of votes cast or millimiters of liquid evaporated.
Kanazawa then used his results to explain that while black women are less attractive than women in every other race, black men are equally as attractive or more attractive than men of other races. He goes through a number of reasons why this might be (black women, he says, have a higher average body mass index than women who aren’t black, and “Africans have more mutations in their genomes than other races” and those mutation loads “significantly decrease physical attractiveness”) before settling on what he thinks might be an actual cause for his study finding black women so unattractive: testosterone.

The full article from the above quote is here:

http://www.styleite.com/media/black-...ractive-study/

This kind of racist bullshit I would expect from a less reputable source, but Psychology Today? Really?

Psychology Today removed the article from its website due to the protests and uproar about it, but here is a link to the actual article reposted on buzzfeed.com:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/why-b...attractive-tha

[Kobi]

Satoshi Kanazawa, PhD (born November 16, 1962) is a controversial Japanese[1] evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics. His research uses evolutionary psychology to analyze social sciences such as sociology, economics, and anthropology.[2]

In 2003, in an article in the Journal of Research in Personality, he claimed to show that scientists generally made their biggest discoveries before their mid-30s, and compared this productivity curve to that of criminals.[3]

In 2006 he published an article in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, claiming that attractive people are 26% less likely to have male offspring.[4][5]

Kanazawa has co-written three books with Alan Miller: "Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire—Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do", Why Men Gamble and Women Buy Shoes: How Evolution Shaped the Way We Behave and Order by Accident: The Origins and Consequences of Conformity in Contemporary Japan. He also writes a blog entitled The Scientific Fundamentalist for Psychology Today.

Kanazawa uses the term Savanna principle[6]: the theory that societal difficulties exist because the human brain evolved in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, a drastically different environment from today's urban, industrial society.

Commenting on the criticism directed against some evolutionary psychology theories, Kanazawa has stated that "The only responsibility that scientists have is to the truth, nothing else. Scientists are not responsible for the potential or actual consequences of the knowledge they create."[7]

Commenting on the War on Terror, Kanazawa claimed that "there is one resource that our enemies have in abundance but we don’t: hate... We may be losing this war because our enemies have a full range of human emotions while we don’t." He offers the following thought experiment: "Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost."[8]

In March 2011, Kanazawa wrote an article titled, 'Are All Women Essentially Prostitutes?' The article reads, "high-class prostitutes like Allie and Maggie have more in common with college professors, corporate executives, or poets than with the more affordable and visible members of their profession...[p]rostitution is evolutionarily familiar, because mating is evolutionarily familiar and prostitutes (at least the classy ones) are no different from other women, whom men also have to pay – not in cash payments but in dinners and movies, gifts, flowers, chocolates, and motor oil..."[9]

Kanazawa's theories on race and intelligence are controversial. Kanazawa has argued that Asian cultural traditions and/or character inhibit Asian scientific creativity[10] and that "political correctness" is a bigger threat to American evolutionary psychology than religious fundamentalism.[11] He has been accused of promoting "racist stereotypes".[12] In 2006 Kanazawa published a paper suggesting that the poor health of people in some nations is the result not of poverty, but of lower intelligence.[13] In a letter to the editors regarding Kanazawa's claim that attractive people are more likely to have daughters,[14] Columbia statistician Andrew Gelman points out that a correct interpretation of the regression coefficients in Kanazawa's analysis is that attractive people are 8% more likely to have girls, an error that Kanazawa acknowledges. [15] Gelman argues that Kanazawa's analysis does not convincingly show causality, because of possible endogeneity as well as problematic interpretations of statistical significance in multiple comparisons. While Kanazawa claims that the former error is "merely linguistic" and that he addressed the latter two in his initial article,[5] Gelman maintains that his original criticism remains valid.[16] [17]

In the British Journal of Health Psychology George Ellison wrote that the theory is based on flawed assumptions, questionable data, inappropriate analysis and biased interpretations. Ellison wrote that Kanazawa mistook statistical associations for evidence of causality and falsely concluded that populations in sub-Saharan Africa are less healthy because they are unintelligent and not because they are poor.[18] Kevin Denny wrote similar criticisms regarding the IQ data and stated that African Americans should have similar IQs when compared to the sub-Saharan African population and that Kanazawa should have measured the distance between areas in a topographical fashion.[19] P.Z. Myers, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota, has called Kanazawa "the great idiot of social science."[20]

On May 18, 2011, the University of London Union Senate, the Union's legislative body representing over 120,000 students, voted unanimously in favor of calling for a campaign for Kanazawa's dismissal. The reasons stated for this call for dismissal include flawed research and unscientific bigotry.[29][30]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Kanazawa

[CherylNYC]

I read this reprehensible excuse for scientific research the week it came out. I wrote my letter of protest at that time. You can sign a petition through Change.org demanding the Psychology Today apologise for this twaddle:

http://www.change.org/petitions/psyc...e=action_alert

[Corkey]

What is ugly is the meanness of this researcher. Total bigot.

[AtLast]

What I am having a very difficult time with is that this "study" is being called "scientific."

[Kobi]

This spurred me to investigate evolutionary psychology....never heard of this field before.

http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html

Interesting stuff.

[Nat]

Fuck That.! Jesus.

[Spork]

This is the kind of people that give a terrible image to some fields of study that are truly interesting, and helpful to understand the way we are.

The scientific method is objective, and it's absolutely useless when you have an agenda. Even pretending to be objective is pointless, since the result will become subjective. This type of thing doesn't benefit ANYONE.

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Kobi

This spurred me to investigate evolutionary psychology....never heard of this field before.

http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html

Interesting stuff.

When my wife pointed this article out to me, I cringed. EvoPsych/sociobiology is an intellectual passion of mine. If I could write just ONE book in my life, it would be a good primer on evo-psych and why I think it is critical, absolutely vital in fact, for left-leaning activists to understand the subject matter. Articles like the one published by Dr. Kanazawa make it that much more difficult to get liberals/progressives to pay attention to this field because most people will only ever encounter it when someone in the field publishes something like this blog post. That said, it should be noted that Dr. Kanazawa's paper was not a peer-reviewed article but a blog post.

I think that evo-psych is an important field. One of the most important new areas of the life sciences to come along in the last century. It is important because I think that the dominant models of human psychology used by both the left and the right are both spectacularly wrong because they are both based upon the idea that, unlike all other species on this planet, human beings do not have 'species typical behavior'. We are perfectly comfortable with the idea that, for instance, all domestic dogs share a range of common behaviors that they also share with other canines. We have no problem with the idea that all domestic cats share a range of common behaviors that they share, to some greater or lesser degree, with the larger cats. When it comes to us, however, we think that there's no inherent structure to our brains and that we are infinitely malleable. This cannot be true if human beings are an evolved species--and we are an evolved species.

Our politics should be driven by an understanding of the constraints we are operating under because of what we are. We cannot build just ANY society we might dream up. Some societies are more likely to work than others. To take two polar-opposite examples, neither a pure communist nor a pure libertarian society will work because we do not have brains that are like ants or orangutans respectively. A pure communist society runs up against the fact that people *prefer* their relatives and intimates to strangers. It runs up against the free-rider problem. A pure libertarian society runs aground on the shoals of the fact that we are not solitary creatures and that we have interests that are not, necessarily, subject to a cost-benefit rational actor economic solution. It also runs up against the free-rider problem. However, if we operate off the belief that there is no reason for me to prefer, say, my son over any random young man on the street or there is no reason for me to be more concerned about the welfare of my spouse than about any given random person on the street, we will try to build a society that runs contrary to human nature.

Just as there are general questions about biology that make no sense except in light of evolution, there are things in human society and psychology that make no sense except in light of evolutionary psychology. To take just one example, why are we *so* moral? The answer from evo psych is that we have a suite of mental modules that create the 'moral emotions' (anger, guilt, shame, etc.) and that provide us with a set of social tools to deal with cheaters, liars and free-riders (e.g. gossip, ostracism, taboos, etc.).

Cheers
Aj