Thursday, May 26, 2011

Psychology Today was wrong, wrong, wrong

photo from Change.org
 Lets fight bullshit science wherever and whenever we find it.  Please click the link and sign the petition
from Change. org:
"A week ago, the magazine Psychology Today published an article titled "Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?” on its website. Within hours, following widespread outrage and criticism, the post disappeared.
Colleagues and peers of Satoshi Kanazawa, the article's author, have since analyzed his same data and unanimously (and unsurprisingly) found his conclusions in error.
Yet Psychology Today has remained silent. They have refused to apologize or even explain why they published the article.
Articles like Kanazawa's are more than offensive or spurious—they're deeply harmful because they promote racist and sexist stereotypes as science.
That’s why documentary filmmaker Aishah Simmons and academic Alisa Bierria are leading a petition on Change.org to call on Psychology Today to apologize and take transparent steps to prevent the publication of racist and sexist material in the future.  
Click here to sign Aishah and Alisa's petition.
Kanazawa's article never would have survived a thorough and responsible editorial process. In fact, the author himself doesn't stand up to review.
Kanazawa has a history of pushing discredited research and is particularly notorious for making meritless claims about race and gender. (He is also known as the mind behind the much-mocked book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters.)"
*UPDATE 6/02/11* 
The efforts of you and more than 75,000 other ColorOfChange members paid off.1 Psychology Today has now agreed to remove controversial author Satoshi Kanazawa, the author of a deeply offensive article regarding Black women, from its website, and they have implemented new policies to prevent inflammatory content in the future.
It wasn’t easy or a foregone conclusion. After staying silent for almost two weeks, Psychology Today on Friday issued an apology, but they refused to say how they would prevent such a situation from happening again. Then hundreds of ColorOfChange members started calling the magazine by phone, along with additional pressure on Facebook and Twitter demanding a clearer response — at which point Psychology Today came correct and did the right thing. 
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