Magazine sorry for ‘Black women less attractive’ piece

AMERICAN magazine Psychology Today has apologised for an article by evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa titled Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?

Published almost a month ago, the article caused mass outrage among American media.

The text used data based on another study to make several claims such as “black women are objectively less physically attractive than other women” yet “subjectively consider themselves to be far more physically attractive than others”.

After some attempted editing of the title, the magazine retracted the post from its website in its entirety.

Kanazawa in turn is facing an investigation by the London School of Economics, where he is a professor, after a unanimous vote for his dismissal by the student union.

Contributing writers to Psychology Today moved quickly to do some damage control. Dr Scott Barry Kaufman, in his blog for the magazine Beautiful Minds, wrote a post reanalysing Kanazawa’s data.

“We retrieved the data from Add Health on which Satoshi Kanazawa based his conclusions to see whether his results hold up to scrutiny... Kanazawa mentions several times that his data on attractiveness are scored “objectively”... [However] the low convergence of ratings finding suggests that in this very large and representative dataset, beauty is mostly in the eye of the beholder. Because raters differ strongly in terms of how they rate... this source of variation needs to be taken into account when testing for average race differences in ratings of attractiveness. Kanazawa does not indicate that he did so,” wrote Dr Kaufman.

However, many were still waiting for a direct response from the magazine.

In response, Kaja Perina, editor in chief, said: “We deeply apologise for the pain and offence that this post caused. Psychology Today’s mission is to inform the public, not to provide a platform for inflammatory and offensive material.

“Psychology Today does not tolerate racism or prejudice of any sort. The post was not approved by Psychology Today, but we take full responsibility for its publication on our site.

“We have taken measures to ensure that such an incident does not occur again. Again, we are deeply sorry for the hurt that this post caused.”