Adams: Subjectivity and bad science

Janus Adams is an author, historian and social commentator.

Last month, Psychology Today published an incendiary blog post on its website. The article, by Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics, a regular contributor to the site, was titled "Why Black Women Are Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women." Readers took offense -- and action.

About a week after the post appeared, ColorOfChange.org -- the nation's largest African-American online political organization -- called on its base of 750,000 members to send a message to the magazine.

In a feat of consciousness-raising and activism, and despite the holiday weekend, more than 75,000 people signed a petition calling for the magazine to account for its actions.

As of Wednesday, Psychology Today had taken down the offensive post, issued a reluctant apology, and removed Kanazawa from its list of authorized scholar-bloggers.

The issue here is, of course, larger than hurt feelings. It's also about the damage done by scientists whose work can be used -- or misused -- to influence policy. An evolutionary psychologist, Kanazawa has been called to task before for perpetuating long-discredited theories of race, evolution and genetics.

Evolutionary psychologists are regularly criticized as direct descendants of the eugenicists. In 1907, at the height of the eugenics movement, Indiana passed the world's first involuntary sterilization law based on its theories, notions begun in the United States that Nazi Germany would later cite as inspiration for its "Final Solution."

Although eugenics-inspired laws would eventually be declared unconstitutional, the spirit of this pseudo-scholarship continued to provide the "scientific" grounds and euphemistic cover for later restrictive covenants, from immigration to zoning laws, meant to protect society from Eastern Europeans, African-Americans and other "undesirables."

And eugenics continues to fuel the work of those who rear their heads every few years with "proof" that black people are genetically inferior. Kanazawa based his ill-conceived conclusions on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which sent 350 interviewers to follow 20,000 U.S. adolescents from 1994 to 2008. The federally funded survey studied how behaviors in adolescents are linked to outcomes in young adulthood. Of the diverse respondents and their interviewers, about 10 percent were black women and girls.

Among the many questions, subjects were asked about their relationships and who they found attractive. And the interviewers, in reporting their findings, were asked to rate the attractiveness of the subjects.

Kathleen Mullan Harris, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sociologist and director of the study, explained the purpose of such questions: "There is a wealth of research evidence to show that the way society views us influences policy." In other words, how people are viewed drives the policies enacted that affect them.

Kanazawa took the attractiveness ratings of the interviewers, which are by definition subjective, and treated them as objective -- skewing the data to have a significance the study does not support.

To be sure, there are those who cite the uproar over the post as another episode of "political correctness." But, the damage goes much deeper that.

Says Rashad Robinson, executive director of ColorOfChange

.org, "It wasn't enough [for Psychology Today] to apologize. It's not enough to go silent; to take the piece down and pretend you've done nothing wrong. We need to know what steps have been put into place it this never happens again."

Readers need to know where to put our trust when it is violated by those who carry the veneer of credibility.

How can you tell whether what you're reading is fact or fiction, science or propaganda? One way is to be skeptical. And to realize that if some claim seems wildly provocative, it's worth taking a closer look at the data -- and motivations -- behind it.