Satoshi Kanazawa

Satoshi Kanazawa is a figure in evolutionary psychology, serving as Reader in Management at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He also holds the position of Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology at University College London and in the Department of Psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London. Kanazawa has written more than 90 articles and chapters spanning psychology, sociology, political science, economics, anthropology, biology, and medicine. He has served as Associate Editor of the Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology.

Kanazawa's scholarly work focuses on the application of evolutionary theory to human behavior and cognition. Among his theoretical contributions is the Savanna Principle, which states that the human brain has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment. He also posits that general intelligence, as measured by psychometric tests, evolved as a domain-specific cognitive adaptation specialized for solving evolutionarily novel and nonrecurrent problems encountered occasionally in the ancestral environment. These lines of inquiry converge in what Kanazawa calls the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis, which predicts that the human difficulty in dealing with evolutionarily novel stimuli interacts with general intelligence, such that the Savanna Principle holds stronger among the less intelligent than among the more intelligent.

Kanazawa has translated his academic research into several books. He co-authored, with Alan Miller, "Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters," "Why Men Gamble and Women Buy Shoes: How Evolution Shaped the Way We Behave," and "Order by Accident: The Origins and Consequences of Conformity in Contemporary Japan." His solo book, "The Intelligence Paradox: Why the Intelligent Choice Isn't Always the Smart One," examines the nature of intelligence at the intersection of evolutionary psychology and intelligence research.

Kanazawa's career has included significant controversy. Psychology Today dismissed him following a widely criticized blog post, and the London School of Economics suspended him from publishing in non-peer-reviewed journals for a period, after which he issued an apology stating that the post was flawed. In response to the controversy, an open letter signed by 68 evolutionary psychologists distanced themselves from Kanazawa while defending the broader discipline, stating that the principle of applying evolutionary theory to the study of human psychology and behavior is sound. In response, 23 scientists published a letter in Times Higher Education defending Kanazawa's work. Despite debate surrounding some of his conclusions, Kanazawa remains a widely cited and discussed voice at the intersection of evolutionary biology, psychology, and the social sciences.