Monthly Archives: May 2011

This week, the popular science magazine Psychology Today found itself at the centre of controversy following their publication of a blog post by evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa. His post was subsequently removed from the Psychology Today website, but you can consult the it here (or here for a text-based version). Interestingly, the way I located this cached post-deletion copy was via a web search that took me to a particular discussion board described by Wikipedia as “a white nationalist and supremacist neo-Nazi Internet forum” and “the Internet’s first major hate site” (for legal reasons, I won’t name or link the forum here). The fact that contributors at the forum were wholly approving of Kanazawa’s article (“very well written”, “well researched”, and “truthful” was their verdict) probably tells you much of what you need to know about the nature of its content. So does the article’s title: “Why are black women less physically attractive than other women?”

Kanazawa described some data he had accumulated from a large-scale longitudinal study of adolescents. Then, following a methodology that I explain a bit more below, he drew the conclusion that black women were statistically “far less attractive than white, Asian, and Native American women”. He went on to slice and dice the figures a bit, but it all came back to the same point: “black women are objectively less physically attractive than other women” (my emphasis). (He is not cautious about elaborating upon the implications either, unhesitatingly raising what he calls “the positive association between intelligence and physical attractiveness.”) To clarify his reasoning, he presented his statistical findings using several graphics such as the following:

Now you just know this must be scientific because: (a) the variable name is nicely jargon-laden (“Mean latent physical attractiveness”); (b) the scores are expressed to a whopping five decimal places; and (c) error bars are shown, which presumably somehow reflect the sophistication of the analysis that was performed. In addition, the fact that there were several such graphics appears to suggest that Kanazawa was looking at a very large dataset. However, contrary to these visual cues, the study described here (such as it is an actual ‘study’) is really quite weak. In fact, very weak. In fact it is so terribly weak as to lie almost beyond the realm of ordinary scientific criticism. And this is precisely the reason that I believe that the post should not have been taken down. Continue reading →