Study: Brain Objectifies Women As Body Parts, Men As Whole

Submitted by Mastodon on Thu, 2012-07-26 21:27

Article here. Excerpt:

'LINCOLN, Neb. (CBS St. Louis) — A recent study finds that our brain objectifies women as different body parts, while viewing men as a whole.

The study, published in June’s European Journal of Social Psychology, was conducted by Sarah Gervais, a psychology professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

She conducted experiments by presenting 227 participants of the study with images of men and women, finding that men were perceived as a “global” – or whole – cognitive processing level, while women were seen on a “local” cognitive processing level.

“Local processing underlies the way we think about objects: houses, cars and so on. But global processing should prevent us from that when it comes to people,” Gervais said in the study. “We don’t break people down to their parts, except when it comes to women, which is really striking. Women were perceived in the same ways that objects are viewed.”

The participant pool, which was evenly divided between men and women, were first provided images of fully-clothed people. They were then shown two images: the original clothed image from before and then an image of a sexual body part. The study found that the participants more easily identified a woman’s body part shown in isolation than presented in the context of her entire body, and vice versa for men.'

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Comments

Hmm, I'd be careful to draw too much from such a small sample. If there is going to be a conclusion this sweeping about how men and women are perceived by members of both sexes, it ought to be very large and cross cultural and geographic barriers. I'd need to see a lot more to say I think the conclusions are sound.

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Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2012-07-28 18:26

I agree with your comment Matt, about small studies tend to be less accurate. but even if a larger study was done and it had the same conclusion; my reaction would be the same: So what?

Usually biology/nature is spot on as far as making the best chance for a species to survive even if humans have a hard time accepting some aspects that they don't like.

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Submitted by Kris on Sat, 2012-07-28 19:41

Sarah J. Gervais Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in Social and Law Psychology and the director of the Power and Subtle Prejudice Lab at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

*bold added by me, but that has to be the most ludicrous 'created for the sake of it' non-job/title, I have ever seen.. and I have seen some crazy shit from the entitlementists

That should give enough of an indication of her prejudice and bias, she studied/coerced just enough people to get the results she wanted.

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Submitted by Neil_Evil on Mon, 2012-07-30 01:39

Here is a better link to the study: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120725150215.htm

according to that link:

participants saw a fully clothed person from head to knee [for a fraction of a second]. After a brief pause, they then saw two new images on their screen: One that was unmodified and contained the original image, the other a slightly modified version of the original image with a sexual body part changed. Participants then quickly indicated which of the two images they had previously seen. They made decisions about entire bodies in some trials and body parts in other trials. [end]

So in her study, BOTH men and woman had the same results as they BOTH could identify the body parts that belonged to the original photo more often in female photos compared to male photos.

Dr. Sarah Gervais takes these results and comes to the conclusion that both men and woman objectify woman more than they objectify men.

Wether this study proves anything or not, I can tell just from my life experiences that women are more objectified for body parts compared to men. And like the study suggests it comes from both genders. Men are more likely to fixate on a woman's body part and woman are also more likely to draw attention to their body parts (push up bras, boob jobs, butt enhancers, etc)

I say who cares? But why all the denial about this?

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Submitted by Kris on Mon, 2012-07-30 18:19

Because men are put on the defensive for it. To acknowledge this is to be called sexist and oppressive, even though it's not. The denial is generally of the being sexist, or that the behaviour is actually objectification. At least in my experience

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Submitted by Kratch on Mon, 2012-07-30 19:46