A recent article in Psychology Today asked, "Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?" (alt link). It lead to a lot of uproar, which I won't rehash.However, as I read through the article, I naturally began to construct counterarguments as if the article were composed of many Logical Reasoning stimuli. This is something I often do when I see flawed arguments.
It's also something you should do when reading any article containing arguments - especially when you see an article making strong claims without sufficient evidence and lots of assumptions, as this one does.
More than a few questions came to mind as I read this article.
I'll raise a couple of big ones to get the ball rolling, but I'd really like to see all of you analyze this more in the comments and have some fun identifying the various flaws in the article.
Questions:
The interviewers:
Who were the interviewers rating the various women? To what extent are they representative of the population in general? How many interviewers rated each woman? How many interviewers were there?
The women:
How many women were part of the study? How was the race of each woman determined? To what extent was the sample of women representative of a particular state, region, country, etc.? Were the attractiveness ratings limited to facial features, or do they include body type?
The "explanation" and other unsupported claims:
In the final few paragraphs, the author makes a number of problematic and insufficiently-supported claims regarding BMI, intelligence, genetic mutation, and hormones. He concludes that the supposed racial difference in attractiveness is due to higher testosterone levels in black women because this is the only explanation he can imagine.
In order to improve his argument, he would need to first conduct a perfect (or close to it) study to establish his claim regarding attractiveness, addressing the questions I raised above.
Suppose he was able to do this (no easy feat, given the slippery and normative concepts of both race and attractiveness).
He would then need to systematically dismiss as many other potential explanations for his conclusion as possible. In his article, he only addresses a few, and even those are not supported or sufficiently explained.
***
Your Turn:
What flaws / information gaps do you see in the cited study?
What flaws / assumptions do you see in the author's consideration of (or failure to consider) potential alternative explanations?
What flaws / assumptions do you see in the author's selection of one potential explanation?
What, if anything, did the author do well in making his argument?
What could the author have done better in making his argument?
What could the author have done better with the information at his disposal and/or his topic in general?
Photos by Wikimedia Commons and MiKeARB
