Repeat Offender: Satoshi Kanazawa’s Other Greatest Misses
Here’s a little 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.
That post is still active on PT’s website, while Monday’s has been pulled – justifiably, according to fellow PT blogger Mikhail Lyubansky. But it wasn’t because Kanazawa’s work arrived at an unpopular confusion, emphasis his:
The point is that there are also group differences, not in attractiveness (as Kanazawa claims), but in cultural messages about what is and is not attractive. Standards of beauty, like most other beliefs, are socialized and change not only from place to place but also over time. In both the United States and England, (where Kanazawa lives and works), standards of beauty are essentially “White” standards, because whites comprise the majority of the population and have disproportional control over both media and fashion. And while it is not just White respondents who are socialized this way (internalized racism has been well documented), it is certainly the case that White Americans and Europeans (who are less likely to have received more positive messages about Black beauty) would show the strongest anti-Black bias.
As long as this is understood and framed accordingly, there is no problem with the data Kanazawa reports. What they show is that because Black faces and bodies don’t fit mainstream White standards of physical attractiveness, both respondents and interviewers show an anti-Black bias. Unfortunately, Kanazawa fails to consider either sample bias or socializing effects. Even if he believes, as he apparently does, that human behavior is entirely “evolutionary”, good science requires a careful analysis of sample bias and an explicit discussion regarding the study’s generalizability. Without this kind of methodological analysis, Kanazawa’s entire premise — that there is such a thing as a single objective standard of attractiveness — is fatally (and tragically) flawed.
It is worth noting that Kanazawa repeats this same flaw of omission when he explains that the attractiveness results are not due to race group differences in intelligence, as though there are no scholarly critiques of IQ measures in general and their racial bias in particular.
These are not trivial omisisions. They are the necessary context that gives readers the information they need to draw their own conclusions.
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