Satoshi Kanazawa

Satoshi Kanazawa
Born (1962-11-16) 16 November 1962
United States[1]
Residence England, United Kingdom
Citizenship United States
United Kingdom
Alma mater University of Arizona
Scientific career
Fields Evolutionary psychology
Institutions London School of Economics

Satoshi Kanazawa (born 16 November 1962) is an American-born British evolutionary psychologist and author. He is currently Reader in Management at the London School of Economics. His work uses evolutionary psychology to analyse social sciences such as sociology, economics, and anthropology.[2] Kanazawa has been very controversial on subjects relating to race and intelligence, health and intelligence, multiculturalism, as well as the relationship between physical attractiveness and intelligence. He attributes this to "political correctness" and "censorship",[3][4] while his critics claim that what he does is "bad science"[5] and "racist".[6]

In response to ongoing controversies over his stated views (such as Sub-Saharan Black African countries suffer from chronic poverty and disease because their people have lower IQs, and black women are objectively less attractive than women of other races), he was dismissed from writing for Psychology Today, and his employer, the London School of Economics, prohibited him from publishing in non-peer-reviewed outlets for 12 months.[7] A group of 68 evolutionary psychologists issued an open letter titled "Kanazawa's bad science does not represent evolutionary psychology" rejecting his views,[8] and an article on the same theme was published by 35 academics in American Psychologist.[9]

Life and career

He began working at the London School of Economics in 2003.[10]

In February 2008, he started a blog on Psychology Today called "The Scientific Fundamentalist." He was dismissed after the controversy over his "Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?" article in May 2011.

In September 2012, after the period of 12 months when he was prohibited from publishing in non-peer-reviewed outlets by the LSE, he was hired by the blog Big Think as a contributing editor; the co-operation was discontinued on 29 March 2013.[11]

Publications and views

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
  • Order by Accident: The Origins and Consequences of Conformity in Contemporary Japan

He also wrote a blog, The Scientific Fundamentalist, for Psychology Today until his dismissal in 2011.[12]

Kanazawa uses the term Savanna principle to denote 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.[13] 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.[14]

Attractiveness and sex of offspring

In 2006, he published an article in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, claiming that attractive people are 26% less likely to have male offspring.[15][16] In a letter to the editors regarding Kanazawa's claim that attractive people are more likely to have daughters,[17] 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.[18] 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,[16] Gelman maintains that his original criticism remains valid.[19]

Race and attractiveness

In May 2011, he published an article in Psychology Today that explored why black women had been rated less attractive than those of other races in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Subsequent critical independent analysis of the results showed that the difference in assessed attractiveness held for three of the four data sets in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and that there was only a statistically significant race difference in younger women and that it disappeared by early adulthood.[20] Applying his same reasoning to males, Kanazawa also concluded in his article that black men would generally be considered more attractive. Kanazawa was also criticised for arguing that the common factor of subjective interviewer ratings of attractiveness used in his analysis constitutes an objective scale of attractiveness.[21]

The article caused outrage and was widely criticised. The first criticisms were published in the blogosphere leading to the creation of petitions on Change.org and Facebook to have Kanazawa fired.[22] But also other scientists, including a group of evolutionary psychologists publishing a joint statement published criticisms, distancing the discipline of evolutionary psychology from Kanazawa's research.[8] Psychology Today pulled the article and on 27 May 2011, issued an apology to anyone who had been offended and stated that they had not reviewed Kanazawa's article before its publication,[23] and stated that they would police more strictly for controversial content in the future.[12]

In September 2011, Kanazawa apologised to LSE director Judith Rees, saying he "deeply regrets" the "unintended consequences" of the blog and accepting that "some of [his] arguments may have been flawed and not supported by the available evidence". An internal LSE investigation found that Kanazawa had brought the school into disrepute and prohibited him from publishing in non-peer-reviewed outlets for a year.[24] Following the controversy, an open letter was signed by 68 evolutionary psychologists distancing themselves from Kanazawa and defending evolutionary psychology, writing "The principle of applying evolutionary theory to the study of human psychology and behaviour is sound, and there is a great deal of high-quality, nuanced, culturally-sensitive evolutionary research ongoing in the UK and elsewhere today".[8] In response, an international group of 23 scientists published a letter in Times Higher Education defending Kanazawa's work.[25]

Correlation of health and intelligence

In 2006, Kanazawa used the "Savanna principle" to explain the correlation of health and IQ vs. health and wealth. He argued that IQ is a better predictor for health than wealth or inequality in most regions of the world, except in Sub-Saharan Africa, where health is more strongly correlated to wealth than to IQ, because Sub-Saharan Africa represents an "evolutionary familiar" environment with lesser selection pressure on IQ than elsewhere.[26] In a criticism of the paper George Ellison (2007) argued that the conclusion was based on "flawed assumptions, questionable data, inappropriate analysis and biased interpretations".[27]

Savanna principle

Savanna Principle is a term coined by Satoshi Kanazawa in 2004 for the principle that human behavior remaining to some extent adapted to the ancestral environment of early Homo in the savanna may lead to problems in a modern (Industrial or post-Industrial) environment. Kanazawa uses this disparity to explain "a host of societal difficulties". For example, ancestors who craved sugary and fatty foods lived longer and were healthier than those who didn't, in a time that such things were relatively scarce. Today, the abundance of such temptations leads to obesity and heart disease. Similar scenarios are illustrated with television,[28] sex, and jealousy.

Kanazawa presented this argument in 2004 in the form of a short journal article called "The Savanna principle"[29][30] and expounded upon it in a 2007 book aimed at a general audience, Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters.[31]

In 2006, Kanazawa used the "Savanna principle" to explain the correlation of health and IQ vs. health and wealth. He argued that IQ is a better predictor for health than wealth or inequality in most regions of the world, except in Sub-Saharan Africa, where health is more strongly correlated to wealth than to IQ, because Sub-Saharan Africa represents an "evolutionary familiar" environment with lesser selection pressure on IQ than elsewhere.[32]

In a 2010 paper, Kanazawa proposed the Savanna-IQ interaction hypothesis. This hypothesis, which is based on the "savanna principle", proposes that more intelligent individuals are more likely to engage in evolutionarily novel behaviors and believe in values that promote greater desire for novelty, such as political liberalism.[33] It has been criticized for allegedly being unfalsifiable and for making contradictory predictions.[34]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Kanazawa, Satoshi (2012). The Intelligence Paradox: Why the Intelligent Choice Isn’t Always the Smart One. ISBN 978-0-470-58695-2.
  2. ↑ Dr Satoshi Kanazawa, London School of Economics. Retrieved 6 September 2006
  3. ↑ "Psychology Today: "If the truth offends, it's our job to offend", 2008". Archived from the original on 23 December 2015.
  4. ↑ "Inconvenient truths about our evolution?". The Independent. 2010-11-30. Retrieved 2017-07-23.
  5. ↑ http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/the-bad-science-of-satoshi-kanazawa%5Bfull+citation+needed%5D
  6. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/may/18/satoshi-kanazawa-black-women-psychology-today%5Bfull+citation+needed%5D
  7. ↑ "LSE lecturer Dr Satoshi Kanazawa tells of race blog 'regret'" "BBC, 16 September 2011"
  8. 1 2 3 "Kanazawa Statement | Academia | Science". Scribd.com. 2016-03-29. Retrieved 2018-04-28.
  9. ↑ Scott Barry Kaufman, "Satoshi Kanazawa Does Not Speak for All of Evolutionary Psychology", Huffington Post, 18 May 2011
  10. ↑ http://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa%5Bfull+citation+needed%5D
  11. ↑ Hopkins, Phillip (29 March 2013). "The End of a Bold Experiment: Big Think and Satoshi Kanazawa". Big Think.
  12. 1 2 "Psychology Today Agrees to remove Controversial Author Satoshi Kanazawa from Website; Implements New Policies to Prevent Inflammatory Content". Color of Change. 1 June 2011.
  13. ↑ Kanazawa, Satoshi (2004) The Savanna principle. Managerial and decision economics, 25 (1). pp. 41–54. ISSN 0143-6570
  14. ↑ Kanazawa, Satoshi (2003). "Why productivity fades with age: The crime–genius connection". Journal of Research in Personality. 37 (4): 257–72. doi:10.1016/S0092-6566(02)00538-X.
  15. ↑ "Beautiful people have girls" John Von Radowitz, News.com.au, 2 August 2006
  16. 1 2 Kanazawa, Satoshi (2007). "Beautiful parents have more daughters: A further implication of the generalized Trivers–Willard hypothesis (gTWH)". Journal of Theoretical Biology. 244 (1): 133–40. doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2006.07.017. PMID 16949101.
  17. ↑ Gelman, Andrew (2007). "Letter to the editors regarding some papers of Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa". Journal of Theoretical Biology. 245 (3): 597–9. doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2006.11.005. PMID 17184794.
  18. ↑ Kanazawa, Satoshi; Reyniers, Diane J. (2009). "The role of height in the sex difference in intelligence". The American Journal of Psychology. 122 (4): 527–36. JSTOR 27784427. PMID 20066931.
  19. ↑ Gelman, Andrew; Weakliem, David (2009). "Of Beauty, Sex and Power". American Scientist. 97 (4): 310. doi:10.1511/2009.79.310.
  20. ↑ "Black Women Are Not (Rated) Less Attractive! Our Independent Analysis of the Add Health Dataset".
  21. ↑ Britton, Khadijah (May 23, 2011). "The Data Are In Regarding Satoshi Kanazawa". Scientific American.
  22. ↑ Angus Hutchison. "'Black women less attractive' blogpost: Anger grows". International Business Times, 20 May 2011.
  23. ↑ Perina, Kaja (27 May 2011). "An Apology from Psychology Today". Psychology Today.
  24. ↑ Jack Grove (15 September 2011). "LSE scholar admits race analysis was 'flawed'". Times Higher Education. Archived from the original on 27 October 2012.
  25. ↑ "Sinned against, not sinning" 16 June 2011, Times Higher Education
  26. ↑ Kanazawa, Satoshi (2006). "Mind the gap…in intelligence: Re-examining the relationship between inequality and health". British Journal of Health Psychology. 11 (4): 623–42. doi:10.1348/135910705X69842. PMID 17032488.
  27. ↑ Ellison, George T. H. (2007). "Health, wealth and IQ in sub-Saharan Africa: Challenges facing the Savanna Principle as an explanation for global inequalities in health". British Journal of Health Psychology. 12 (2): 191–227. doi:10.1348/135910707X180972. PMID 17456282.
  28. ↑ Satoshi Kanazawa. "Why the less intelligent may enjoy television more than the more ..." (PDF). Retrieved 2007-11-05.
  29. ↑ Managerial and decision economics 25 (1), 2004, pp. 41–54
  30. ↑ Kanazawa, Satoshi (1 January 2004). "The Savanna Principle". Managerial and Decision Economics. 25 (1): 41–54. doi:10.1002/mde.1130. ISSN 1099-1468.
  31. ↑ Kanazawa, Satoshi Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters (2007) All, ISBN 978-0-399-53365-5.
  32. ↑ Kanazawa, Satoshi (11 November 2006). "Mind the gap... in intelligence: Re-examining the relationship between inequality and health" (PDF reprint). British Journal of Health Psychology. 11 (4): 623–642. doi:10.1348/135910705X69842. PMID 17032488.
  33. ↑ Kanazawa, Satoshi (2010-02-16). "Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent". Social Psychology Quarterly. 73 (1): 33–57. doi:10.1177/0190272510361602. ISSN 0190-2725.
  34. ↑ Dutton, Edward (September 2013). "The Savanna-IQ interaction hypothesis: A critical examination of the comprehensive case presented in Kanazawa's The Intelligence Paradox". Intelligence. 41 (5): 607–614. doi:10.1016/j.intell.2013.07.024. ISSN 0160-2896.
  • Kanazawa, S. (2010). "Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent". Social Psychology Quarterly. doi:10.1177/0190272510361602.
  • Michaud, Derek (Mar 2010). "Is atheism linked to intelligence?". Science on Religion. A review of Kanazawa's recent "Why liberals and atheists are more intelligent"
  • Profile and videos at Big Think
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.