Why african american women are less attractive

The data Kanazawa used for his research were drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health Add Health , a congressionally-mandated study funded by the U. National Institutes of Health. Add Health data are available in two forms: a "public use" data set, which includes data from a subset of participants, and a "contractual" or "restricted-use" data set, which includes the full set of variables and participants.

The "restricted-use" data are available to researchers who have appropriate research credentials e. Kanazawa applied for and was granted access to these restricted data, as have thousands of other researchers.

Because Add Health was congressionally mandated and funded by the National Institutes of Health, these data are a public resource.

Add Health has sought to make its data widely available to the scientific community of qualified U. Add Health does not stipulate what research topics can or cannot be studied and does not censor research findings. As do other studies, Add Health relies on the scientific peer-review process to evaluate the merits of any given analysis of project data. Kanazawa based his blog post on data derived from interviewer ratings of the respondents that were recorded confidentially after the interview was completed and the interviewer had left the interview setting.

It is a widely-used and accepted survey practice for interviewers and researchers to include such post-survey completion remarks. These remarks provide both an additional observation about the respondent and data on the context of the interview for researchers to assess data quality. In this instance, Kanazawa chose to present interviewer ratings of respondent attractiveness, one component of interviewer post-survey remarks. Because Kanazawa chose to report his results in a blog, his methods and analysis were not subject to the mainstream peer review process that evaluates the scientific quality of research and determines the merit of the work.

Because the methods that would be presented in peer-reviewed research are not included in the blog, it is not possible for other individuals to evaluate the soundness of his methods.

Add Health chose to include these items — among others in the remarks section — for several reasons:. We included these items because there is a long line of research evidence that indicates that perceived attractiveness is related to important health and social outcomes, including access to health care, health education and instruction, job search, promotions, academic achievement, and social success in friendship and marriage.

A wealth of research on perceived attractiveness that is, as perceived by others, not oneself has shown that such ratings vary according to the characteristics of the rater. Other interviewer characteristics that are important to take into account are age, race, ethnicity, education, geographic location, and life experiences, in general.

Notably, several characteristics of the interviewers are available in the restricted use Add Health dataset at Waves 3 and 4. It is these data e. Kathleen Mullan Harris:. The longitudinal study, funded by the federal National Institutes of Health, also asked interviewers to describe their subjects' behavior during interviews, ethnicity, and other characteristics. It's subjective. Add Health is the largest, most comprehensive longitudinal study of adolescents and young adults ever undertaken in the United States.

Add Health began with an in-school questionnaire administered to a nationally representative sample of more than 20, students in grades in The study followed the cohort into young adulthood with four in-home interviews, the most recent in , when respondents were aged This provides unique opportunities for studying how social environments and behaviors in adolescence are linked to health and achievement outcomes in young adulthood.

There are more than 8, Add Health data users who have published thousands of peer-reviewed research articles, many of which have informed public health programs and policies to improve the health and well-being of young people in America. More information about Add Health can be found at www. What is beautiful is good, but. Psychological Bulletin, 1 , — French, M.

Effects of physical attractiveness, personality, and grooming on academic performance in high school. Labour Economics,16 4 , DOI: Hamermesh, D. Beauty and the labor market. Hosoda, M. The effects of physical attractiveness on job-related outcomes: A meta-analysis of experimental studies. Personnel Psychology, 56 2 , — The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Khadijah M. Britton, JD, is founder of BetterBio, a Massachusetts-registered nonprofit and fiscally sponsored project of the c 3 Fractured Atlas whose mission is to empower journalism that reinforces the intimate connection between life and science. She has recently relocated to Washington, DC and is excited to be at the heart of US health and science policy. Follow Khadijah Britton on Twitter. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American.

Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. See Kanazawa's graph, which is magical thinking in the guise of factor analysis: and Kaufman's graph, which makes sense: Like Kaufman, I take great issue with Kanazawa's use of a study on adolescent health and behavior to explain human attractiveness or lack thereof.

In fact, according to Kaufman's reading of the data, correlation might not even really be correlation: The low convergence of ratings finding suggests that in this very large and representative dataset, beauty is mostly in the eye of the beholder. Hierarchical regression analyses are summarized in Table 2.

Steps 1 and 2 revealed that BMI was a significant predictor of self-rated attractiveness, with higher BMI associated with lower perceived attractiveness; also, Black women perceived themselves to be more attractive than White women. Moreover, a significant interaction was found between BMI and race; for White women, a negative relationship was detected between BMI and self-rated attractiveness , , while no relationship was found for Black women , ,.

Education level was not a significant predictor of perceived attractiveness, nor did inclusion of the variable significantly improve the model. Group means for attractiveness at a standard deviation above and below the mean are displayed in Figure 1 [ 14 ]. These results support the buffering hypothesis and findings from past research [ 6 , 7 ], as overweight Black women rated themselves more attractive and reported lower perceived weight than White women despite higher body mass.

Furthermore, ethnicity moderated the relationship between BMI and perceived attractiveness. BMI and attractiveness were negatively associated for White women, while no association was found for Black women. Thus, it can be concluded that for Black women, appearance evaluation is independent of weight, while White women experience less satisfaction with their appearance as their weight increases.

It is possible that cultural differences between Blacks and Whites contributed to the observed results, as postulated by the buffering hypothesis. It has been suggested that Black Americans associate thinness with poor health and economic instability, while more curvaceous body types are indicative of health and beauty [ 2 ]. Also, previous studies have found that Black women are less likely to idealize the thin body type commonly portrayed in mainstream American media [ 15 ].

Black women report that media representations of the thin ideal are more relevant to Whites [ 2 ], contributing to lower drive for thinness and body dissatisfaction among Black women [ 6 , 15 ]. Furthermore, African Americans who report high other-group orientation report higher body dissatisfaction than African Americans oriented to the values of their own cultural group, suggesting that African American values serve a protective role against body dissatisfaction [ 7 ].

Though past research holds that Black cultural ideals buffer them from body image disturbances, less is known about the specific cultural traits that foster positive body esteem. Past research posits that Black women assess their appearance in broader terms, such as carrying oneself with confidence and wearing fashionable hairstyles, makeup, and clothing [ 2 , 16 ]. This may render Black women less susceptible to media influences that define female beauty primarily on the basis of thinness.

More research is needed to elucidate precise cultural values that contribute to high body satisfaction among Black women.

As health researchers have expressed concern that positive body images among overweight Black women may contribute to elevated obesity in the Black community, these findings have implications for weight intervention with this population. Because Black women are less likely to associate overweight with reduced attractiveness, future interventions for obesity among Black populations may benefit from promoting health and wellness as primary advantages of weight loss, rather than focusing on enhanced physical appearance.

As body dissatisfaction is a predictor of poor psychological outcomes [ 17 — 19 ], it is of primary importance that obesity interventions for Black individuals aim to reduce body weight without instilling cultural perspectives that idealize a slender body type. Though the current study examined race differences in the relationship between BMI and attractiveness, research suggests that body shape, specifically waist-to-hip ratio, is a more robust indicator of female attractiveness that is less susceptible to ethnic variations in body mass [ 20 ].

Thus, future research should examine the role of body-fat distribution in determining attractiveness perception among obese women. Also, because the data are cross-sectional, no conclusions can be made regarding the directionality of the relationship between perceived attractiveness and weight.

Longitudinal research should investigate whether perceived attractiveness influences weight gain over time among obese women or vice versa, and examine whether ethnicity affects the trajectory of these variables over time.

Also, it is important that the body image concerns of minority women are not overlooked on the basis of comparative research, as many Black women continue to report culture-specific body dissatisfaction. For example, Black women tend to desire a more curvaceous body type [ 15 ] and often endorse dissatisfaction with skin tone [ 21 ]. Continued research is needed on the nature of specific body image concerns among Black women. The conclusion that Black women evaluate their attractiveness independently of perceived weight is relevant to interventions for weight loss that target this population.

Further research is needed to determine the influence of body shape on perceived attractiveness among obese women and to examine whether perceived attractiveness contributes to racial differences in weight gain over time. Chithambo and Stanley J. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Article of the Year Award: Outstanding research contributions of , as selected by our Chief Editors.

Read the winning articles. Journal overview. Special Issues. Chithambo 1 and Stanley J. Academic Editor: Nangel M. Received 13 Nov Accepted 22 Jan Published 26 Feb Abstract Numerous studies have reported that Black women are more satisfied with their bodies than White women. Introduction Black women are at heightened risk for obesity when compared to White women and tend to weigh more than White women on average [ 1 ].

Methods 2. Measures 2. Education Level Because past research has implicated socioeconomic factors in explaining race differences in body dissatisfaction [ 8 ], education level was included in regression analyses as a covariate. Analyses Independent samples -tests were run to evaluate mean group differences in BMI, weight perception, and perceived attractiveness. Results The sample was Standard deviations are in parentheses.

Starting in , thousands of 7th to 12th graders from across the country filled out detailed surveys at their schools and some participated in follow-up interviews at their homes. Over the next 14 years, the multiracial group of participants continued to take Add Health surveys. Instead, he looked at how researchers rated the appearance of the adolescents and later the adults taking the survey. The physical attractiveness of each Add Health respondent is measured three times by three different interviewers over seven years.

Did some bias-free robots from the utopian ether descend upon each testing site to perform this portion of the evaluation? Or were the interviewers human beings, subject to the same racism, sexism, ablelism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, fat phobia and whateverthehellelsephobia that undergirds beauty standards?