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

[Iniko Ujaama]

http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/2012/07/26/study-brain-objectifies-women-as-body-parts-men-as-whole/

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

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.
 
“We always hear that women are reduced to their sexual body parts; you hear about examples in the media all the time,” Gervais said in the study. “This research takes it a step further and finds that this perception spills over to everyday women, too.”
 
Gervais said that this is the first study to link cognitive processes to objectification theory.
 

[akilah_dances!]

Could it be that certain forms of Socialization perpetuated by media, religion, work institutions,family circles en masse has caused us over time to objectify women?As a young child I never percieved myself to be  a thing-until highschool....I got the rude awakening that -til now that I will never be percieved fully in my fullness and power as a divine, whole, aspect of creation.,even if I saw myself as blessed and divine.
I mean a guy once told me all a woman has is a -hole.......if he is just one man to casually state such a horrible view how many millions ascribe to the same?
We see it over and over ...from  most music videos especially,that a woman is a creature of lust-,to be manhandled and mistreated.Space craft ,ships and cars are addressed as -''she'':there SHE blows,dont scratch HER,prepare HER for launch.
So yes the brain is just relaying the info as it comes .......but that info is wrong and the wrong info has to come from some where!!!!

[Iniko Ujaama]

I think you are quite correct about it being our socialization which brings us into this view of women. I do not know to what extent it goes the other way. And I also wonder about the extent to which males of a particular race may be viewed by females of other races in that kind of fragmented way.

Indeed most males are conditioned into any one of the plethora of forms of patriarchal attitudes. Most will probably not be as blunt as the male you emntioned and many of us are not even aware of the extent of our patriarchal conditioning and then to learn to operate in relation to ourselves and to females in alternative ways. Conditioning of both sexes in complementary ways help sustain the thing.

But the study also shows how amenable the brain is to conditioned bias and how we can be totally blind to that.