A clever psychological test has shown that both men and women perceive images of sexy women's bodies as objects, while they see sexy-looking men as people.
The work, published in Psychological Science, notes that while sexual objectification has been well studied, most of the research is about looking at the effects of this objectification. "What's unclear is, we don't actually know whether people at a basic level recognize sexualized females or sexualized males as objects," says researcher Philippe Bernard, of Universit� libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.
Bernard explained that psychological research shows that while we're good at recognizing a whole face, just part of a face is a bit baffling. On the other hand, recognizing part of a chair is just as easy as recognizing a whole chair. One way that psychologists have found to test whether something is seen as an object is by turning it upside down. Pictures of people present a recognition problem when they're turned upside down, but pictures of objects don't have that problem.
So Bernard and his co-researchers used a test where they presented pictures of men and women in sexualized poses, wearing underwear. Each participant watched the pictures appear one by one on a computer screen. Some of the pictures were right side up and some were upside down. After each picture, there was a pause, and then the participant was shown two images. They were supposed to choose the one that matched the one they had just seen.
The results showed that people recognized right-side-up men better than upside-down men, suggesting that they were seeing the sexualized men as people. But the women in underwear weren't any harder to recognize when they were upside down - which is consistent with the idea that people see sexy women as objects. There was no difference between male and female participants.
"We see sexualized women every day on billboards, buildings, and the sides of buses and this study suggests that we think of these images as if they were objects, not people," commented Bernard. "What is motivating this study is to understand to what extent people are perceiving these as human or not." The next step, he adds, is to study how seeing all these images influences how people treat real women.
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Source: Association for Psychological Science
