Study shows people view women as a collection of body parts

Study shows people view women as a collection of body parts

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A small group of researchers has found that true to stereotype, people really do tend to probe women as a collection of body parts, rather than altogether person. What’s perhaps most surprising though, is that the phenomenon is not confined to men, women do it too

set bound see if the commonly held belief that women are objectified by others was true or if it was just myth. They subsidize experiments using undergraduate student volunteers of both genders using photographs and found, as they describe in their paper published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, that not only does the belief stay, but that the conventional mode of viewing perchance switched off given the right circumstances.

Many studies have been conducted regarding the impact feeling objectified by others has on women. Most commonly it can cause negative body issues and eating and mood disorders. But, the researchers found, little work has been done to verify if the feeling of being objectified is something that exists only in the minds of those that feel it, or if in fact, it’s really the way people go through women

To verify, they enlisted the help of 227 undergraduate students of both genders. Each was asked to go through photographs of people near their own age from the knees up; again, of both genders. Following the display of each photograph, each volunteer was then shown two pictures, side by side. One of the pictures was identical to the first picture shown while the other was slightly altered; the bust/chest or waist was changed just a little bit. The volunteers were asked to choose which was the identical the original. A second experiment was conducted in the equally as the first except when the side-by-side pictures were displayed, they were zoomed

After reviewing the results, the researchers found a clear diffe

rence between the way people of both genders view women. They found that the volunteers were better at recognizing body parts of women versus men when viewing both whole images, and images of just those body parts. When viewing pictures of men, they found things were reversed, most of the volunteers were much better at recognizing men if they saw generality person.

Next, the researchers tried something else.

 They showed volunteers pictures of letters that were counting other different tiny letters before showing them the pictures in the first experiments. Some were asked to identify the tiny letters inside the letters, others were asked to identify which letter the little ones formed as a whole. One forced local brain processing the other global. They found that those that were forced to think globally before viewing the photographs were much less given objectify the women in the pictures.The researchers don’t know why people objectify women, but speculate that it’s either per mating behaviors in our antiquity, or perhaps via more recent trends, for example the way modern media portray women.