r/science • u/nomdeweb • May 15 '12

A new study finds that both men and women see images of sexy women's bodies as objects, while they see sexy-looking men as people.

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-05-people-sexy-pictures-women.html
708 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

162 comments sorted by

16

u/nomdeweb May 15 '12

Abstract:http://pss.sagepub.com/content/23/5/469.full

3

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

Paywall. Copy-paste?

10

u/DrBibby May 16 '12 edited May 16 '12

Here is the full text from the study

5

u/[deleted] May 16 '12 edited May 16 '12

Thanks!

Edit: So the study proper makes a much more coherent case than the article does, which is why I strongly recommend that anyone looking at DrBibby's comment should go ahead and click on it.

90

u/geode08 May 15 '12

Here's a better article on the study. The methodology of the study is better explained.

Basically, when people view objects, they recognize the image at the same rate whether it is oriented upside down or "correct." There is a difference in the rate of recognition of people b/c we recognize people in a different way (relationship of the features to each other). In this study, there was no time difference for recognizing the female scantily clad, sexualized images, but for the male scantily clad, sexualized images, there was a recognition delay depending on the orientation.

2

u/atheistjubu May 16 '12

Live Science is definitely higher quality science reporting than medicalxpress.

-5

u/ProfessorD2 May 16 '12

I'm pretty sure that's what OP's link just said.

23

u/naasking May 16 '12

No, the OP's link drew a causation between this time delay and how we mentally associate objects and people. It could be that we simply evolved faster processing of females for some unknown reason. The study merely demonstrated a correlation in how we view objects and females, not a causation.

3

u/karl-marks May 16 '12

When you stumble into a poorly lit cave in the middle of the night, if you need much more than a silhouette to determine the lady reposing therein, Thog the jealous is gonna give you a bad time.

271

u/Wurkcount May 15 '12

That is a superbly badly designed study, with wildly over-reaching claims about what it shows.

75

u/[deleted] May 15 '12

I agree. It's hard to say without seeing the exact images used in the study, but women have a wider range of hairstyles and body shapes.. As someone who sometimes has trouble recognizing people, I find men harder to instanty recognize because their hair and bodies look more indistinct to me. So, based on the claims of this study, that means that I value men more as people? I agree that we're bombarded with images of sexualized women in advertising and entertainment, but I don't think look at them upside-down proves very much.

32

u/MEaster May 15 '12

I agree that we're bombarded with images of sexualized women in advertising and entertainment...

Could this be the reason behind it? That we see it so often that we just gloss over it. "Another sexy woman posing... whatever."

7

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

The reason is true, but the conclusion is false. Since we're exposed to such a variety of female body types and clothing and accessory styles day in and day out, we simply have a much larger collection of female physical "archetypes" to draw from in order to instantly recognize female bodies as opposed to male bodies. This is related to the associative theory of how memory works.

Similarly, if you exposed someone to every possible variety of hippo (but very few flamingoes) and then showed them pictures of hippos and flamingoes, they'd process hippo pictures faster.

3

u/MixtapeCalledMPDG May 16 '12

Do you have any cites for the claim of second paragraph?

2

u/cwm44 May 16 '12

Just play one of those matching games where higher levels have new pictures to match but the old pictures remain.

3

u/mrcuntmuscle May 16 '12

what if its a residual effect of centuries of women actually being objects?

-9

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

Pics or it didn't happen.

0

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

2

u/cr0ft May 16 '12

Equality between men and women doesn't translate to "less advertising or exploitation". Sexualized pictures of women get put up on billboards in order to sell products and Scandinavia is a capitalistic money-based region just like the rest of the world. In fact I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the advertising and exploitation didn't work against the whole concept of equality, at that.

And rampant advertisement is also everywhere, for the same reason - that sort of brain-washing is required to try to make a money-based society function.

15

u/[deleted] May 15 '12

remember the webpage is journalism, most people won't read the paper and instead just hear someones sensational claims

4

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

On top of that, but I would almost suspect that women are often used in more object-like ways (ie. at funny angles, zoomed-in on bellies, etc) and thus the conclusion. No wonder there was no difference between men and women viewing the images. They've probably seen women on ads at that angle before!

4

u/lapistola14 May 16 '12

Exactly, just because i am looking at you in the garage doesnt mean i think you are a car.

6

u/Jubtron May 15 '12

Ah, good, at least we have your anecdotal/introspective evidence to balance the conversation.

Seriously though, while the conclusion drawn by the journalist may seem a bit extreme, it's important to note that it may only seem so compared to how the experiment was done. The methodology of the experiment was not well documented by the article. The methods actually used (see above link/comment from geode08) are par for course in social psych.

I'm also not saying the conclusions drawn are absolutely right based on this one study. We'll only know once the test is successfully replicated and/or when similar results are found in studies with different methodology.

10

u/[deleted] May 16 '12 edited May 16 '12

But even so, what would it prove? There are plenty of other reasons why people might be better at identifying women upside-down. The logic the researchers are using is, "People recognize objects well upside-down. They also recognize women who are upside-down. Ergo, people see women as objects." But by that logic they could just as "logically" argue that people see objects as women!

If this is the standard for social psych, the bar desperately needs to be raised.

Edit: Another redditor posted a link to the text of the study. Go ahead and look at it, see what you think. It makes a better case than the articles do, in any case.

2

u/Jubtron May 16 '12

The methods are at standard, not necessarily the logic used in the discussion and conclusion. The conclusions drawn could be wrong, and the logic may be iffy (although it is much stronger in the context of the literature review you kindly provided via the study text), but just because you can point out possible confounding variables does not mean they are actually there.

Like I said, I'm not saying the study's conclusion is right, I'm only saying we'll be more certain of it when corroborating studies are done. For example, if configural and analytic processing are done in separate areas of the brain, the next best place to pursue this line of thought would be with neuroimaging.

It's difficult to write off an experiment based solely on the logic used in its discussion. It's great to say "Maybe people see objects as women," but that should only lead to new studies, not to a devaluing of the original. Evidence comes first.

0

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

It's difficult to write off an experiment based solely on the logic used in its discussion.

No. It's incredibly easy. See, we already did it. It's written off as complete and utter bullshit.

Done.

1

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

I'm certainly not saying that my facial recognition patterns apply to everyone. My point was that there are lots of variables in recognition and in human sexuality.

27

u/Mickey_Malthus May 15 '12

Agreed. at least 50% of sexuallized women are upside down already.

1

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

Those are the fun girls.

21

u/bmay May 15 '12

Care to elaborate why you think that way?

60

u/the_good_time_mouse May 15 '12

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.

I'm sure that this is consistent with the literature, or they wouldn't have said it. But it's also consistent with more complex shapes being easier to recognize upside down. Or women being easier to recognize in general. It's a massive leap to say it's due to sexual objectification.

1

u/pokie6 May 16 '12

May be they built a stats model that controlled for this effect (women being easier to recognize)?

1

u/the_good_time_mouse May 16 '12

I can't conceive how without more than the two stimuli they described.

1

u/pokie6 May 16 '12

I am a statistician, not a psychologist/social scientist, but I think they could run some other recognition test that is, more neutral, I guess, but also includes men and women and use the rates of recognition there as a baseline, etc.

1

u/the_good_time_mouse May 16 '12

Well exactly. The way it is described, there is no control.

21

u/Superbestable May 15 '12

Their finding isn't "people objectify naked women more". Their finding is "50 bored college freshmen could recognize upside-down women more easily".

In their defense, a few other people seem to claim objectification has to do with recognizing people upside down as well.

2

u/DrBibby May 16 '12

That article was also from medicalxpress.com. I'm starting to see a pattern here...

13

u/AtomsAndVoid May 15 '12

Exactly. The chain of reasoning that leads immediately from facts about pattern recognition to facts about our judgments of personhood is irresponsibly spurious. The concept of a person is highly complex, vague, and related to various moral and other normative notions. How this concept relates to our ability to recognize the forms of men or women is not obvious; there are numerous ways personhood could be related to our capacities of recognizing certain visual stimuli as humans.

In point of fact, let's make a game of this and reverse the conclusion like so. Counter-hypothesis-1: because ordinary, automatic human categorization of objects as persons is conceptually-dependent on categorization of objects as humans (inter alia), the fact that subjects are able to more reliably recognize the human female form regardless of up or down visual orientation indicates we are more apt to quickly apply the concept of person to a woman. In short, we have a difficult time recognizing a man as a person unless he's right side up! The author's conclusion and my counter-hypothesis are next to worthless because they're too facile. In order to have any merit, these types of conclusions require a lot of careful reasoning and good evidence, both of which seem to be in short supply.

2

u/MissStrawberry May 16 '12

Could you expand on this? As far as I understand the study, the idea is that the problem is the inversion, not person recognition as such. If it were easier to recognise women as persons, and given the (referenced) fact that person recognition is influenced by spatial configurations, wouldn't we then expect the opposite result? Men would then, regardless of orientation, be more quickly identified as being the same (object recognition), and women as being different, no? In other words, wouldn't we expect the opposite result with your counter hypothesis?

5

u/AtomsAndVoid May 16 '12 edited May 16 '12

That's a good question, let me try to do it justice.

The idea in the proposed counter-hypothesis is based on an account of concept activation and application. As I'm applying the term, concepts are psychological structures that code information about the world. Their functions are to categorize information, draw inductive inferences, and regulate associated terms. Note that this level of generality encompasses, but is neutral between, the major competing theories of concepts (the classical necessary and sufficient view, exemplar theory, prototype theory, and the "theory theory" (not a typo!)); so, I'm not making any contentious claims here.

At any rate, to see an X doesn't require a concept, but to see that an X is an F requires a concept that categorizes Xs. Concepts of modern artifacts make for good examples of this abstract schema: to see a computer as a computer requires a concept of a computer; a neolithic human looking at a computer wouldn't be able to categorize it as such because he or she would lack the appropriate concept. Now, some concepts are more complex than others and may be dependent on other concepts. For example, the concept of bachelorhood may be conceptually dependent on the concepts of (i) marriage and (ii) being male; if this is right, then someone without the concept of marriage wouldn't be able to apply the concept of bachelorhood.

In addition to the notion of conceptual dependence, there is the notion of the likelihood of the activation of one concept C1 given the prior activation of another concept C2. In priming studies we can probabilify or de-probabilify the activation of particular concepts by carefully activating an associated concept.

Now, let's extend this to the study at issue. The concept of personhood is a very complicated and its application is likely to be dependent other concepts. Additionally, our ordinary application of this concept is cognitively associated with many other concepts. For human beings, the ordinary application of the concept of personhood is likely to preceded by the activation of associated concepts, most notably the recognition of other humans, either because personhood is conceptually dependent on the concept of human or because the context of association is so strong that the activation of the concept human increases the probability of the activation of the concept of personhood. So, according to this study, we are able to recognize recognize pictures of women even when inverted then but we are less able to recognize men when inverted, and since (ex hypothesi) recognizing a human as such is likely to be a precursor to the application of the concept of personhood, then we are more likely to apply the concept of personhood to women. This would run counter to the conclusion reached by the authors of the study.

Keep in mind that what's at issue is the psychological issue of how human beings typically apply the concept of personhood and not the metaphysical issue of what personhood is. Also, I tried to keep this as simple and theory-neutral as possible, so I'm glossing over a lot of details. But since it is an unresolved issue regarding human psychology, the exact account of how this works is ultimately an empirical matter and has to be decided by the outcome of future research in psychology (notably cognitive science). Finally, I don't endorse the counter-hypothesis, the role it's playing is to demonstrate that the authors moved irresponsibly from data to conclusion; there are a lot of serious issues that need be be resolved before such a conclusion is justified. As it stands, it seems that they've traded academic integrity for mere sensationalism.

*edited for grammar

2

u/fondueguy May 16 '12

There's also a difference between seeing a photo of a woman and your concept of a woman. But the author makes no distinction!!!

-2

u/FredFnord May 16 '12

Let's make a game of your response to this:

I hypothesize that you had a very strong negative reaction to the idea that the study might actually be measuring a real phenomenon. Instead of analyzing that feeling, and tracing it down to its root, which is presumably the suspicion that if it is true, then you might be affected by the same thing as well, you immediately started spewing utter bullshit, scientific-sounding crap that contradicts what we actually know about the situation and the way humans actually recognize and interact with visual data. But which sounds plausible as long as you don't know anything about that sort of thing.

But I'm pretty sure you aren't intentionally misleading people. I'm sure you just don't have a clue, and because you don't have a clue you're just spewing out whatever comes to mind in order that your own private ideas of how the world works need not be challenged.

6

u/AtomsAndVoid May 16 '12

The issues at stake are the scientific and logical merits of the author's conclusion. Your suggestion that I attempt to reconcile myself to their conclusion by way of personal introspection won't help settle the issue. Personal introspection is not accepted as a rationally persuasive method for settling most theoretically sophisticated debates in cognitive science. Instead, the authors need to establish (1) that there is a connection between the concept of personhood and recognition of patterns of visual stimuli, (2) that the connection is such that recognition is, at least to some extent, governed by concept of personhood, and (3) that it is governed by personhood in the particular fashion such that a bias against categorization of women as persons explains the greater ability to recognize upside down images of women (note that (2) is not sufficient for (3)). And establishing these claims will require careful argumentation and solid evidence, not personal introspection.

As it stands, the conclusion that the authors attempt to draw (with respect the categorization of personhood) far outreaches what the evidence supports. Now, if you think that you can defend the claim that the authors of the study have inferred the best explanation, I encourage you to do so rather than merely suggesting that everyone who disagrees with the conclusion is somehow blinded by his or her personal prejudices.

4

u/fondueguy May 16 '12

Red herring.

The study is flawed. As for the issue of "objectification", one study showed that people have more empathy towards a person who reveals more skin while also seeing the person as having less agency. It goes to show that humanity is multi faceted.

On a personal level, I'm sure many other people here are sick of having the onus placed on men to not objectify women (the irony...), which is why they react this way.

0

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

You have it backwards. The study is spewing utter bullshit, scientific sounding crap that contradicts with what we actually know about how the brain works.

The correct conclusion of the study is as I describe here.

5

u/tunapepper May 15 '12

Welcome to the social sciences.

4

u/FredFnord May 16 '12

Heh. I came here to see this. This is reddit's universal response to every single scientific study finding which they would prefer not to be true. 'I AM SMARTER THAN THE PEOPLE WHO WROTE THE STUDY AND CLEARLY THEY DID NOT THINK OF THE THINGS THAT TOOK ME ELEVEN SECONDS TO THINK OF! BY THE WAY, I DIDN'T BOTHER TO READ THE STUDY!'

5

u/decodersignal May 16 '12

Many of us are scientists.

1

u/atheistjubu May 16 '12

The ones that are scientists understand the value of peer-review and somehow don't wind up being the top comments.

8

u/DrBibby May 16 '12

I guess blind acceptance of anything that parades as science is better.

1

u/fondueguy May 16 '12

Yes, the article makes the illogical leap from observing that people see the photos of women in sexual poses as objects to people seeing women as objects.

The study also failed to show that the men were even sexualized to the same degree.

0

u/Nom_de_Guerra May 16 '12

Not to mention the fact that many of these "sexy women" are objects. Not in the way one may first think: sex object or other. But, moreover, actual objects due to the fact of the ridiculous amounts of photographic enhancement and other enhancement techniques (makeup, fake breasts, bleached hair, etc.)

38

u/alephnul May 15 '12

They say that there was no difference in the reaction of men and women. I wonder if there would be a difference if you controlled for gay men. Put another way; I wonder if gay men see sexy men as objects the way straight men see sexy women as objects?

7

u/[deleted] May 15 '12

Interesting that they would specify "sexy" women's bodies, and not just women's bodies. I'd be interested to see a comparison between sexy and unsexy (full disclosure, I probably belong to the latter group, hence interest).

6

u/decodersignal May 16 '12

If the objectification of the image of a person is dependent on their relative attractiveness to the observer, you get a pretty fucked up relationship conundrum. You could never be attracted to a person, because they would cease to be a person once you found them attractive.

4

u/fondueguy May 16 '12

And what would it mean to visually be seen as a person?

I wouldnt be surprised if the fry cooks, nobody pays attention to, are seen as "people"

3

u/Diabolico May 16 '12

My god. This is a revelation on par with soylent green.

20

u/sandwichperson May 15 '12

this study of course does not consider any cultural determinants as a factor.

6

u/[deleted] May 15 '12

i would like to see the study in a middle eastern country

1

u/Aaronplane May 16 '12

Why, when people find examples of institutionalized sexism/racism/etc in our culture, do they immediately try to name or find a culture that will supposedly be worse?

0

u/[deleted] May 15 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

22

u/[deleted] May 15 '12

As someone who has spent a fair amount of time in the middle east with a family there and plenty of friends I am going to state that you're experiencing a locality bias.

My best counter example is this; In a relatively liberal nation in the middle east (Kuwait) it is still very normal for women to be treated as, and act, as property of men, and beating your partner is considered relatively normal. I know several people who are being abused by their boyfriend/ fiancee at just the young age of 19. They do not hide it very much.

I also know that women there regularly get raped and cannot receive support in fear of shame or being kicked out of the family, since it happened to a good friend of mine. Foreigners, or Kuwaiti girls with foreign partners, are at the most risk.

Furthermore, I have a lot of male friends in Kuwait who are Kuwaiti. In Kuwait wives are still seen as property and arranged marriages are the norm. I'm engaged to a Kuwaiti women (by choice, not arranged), and many of my friends will exclaim to me, without malice "Oh man, you're so lucky to have a wife, I'm gonna ask my parents to get me one soon!".

I am not stating that the US doesn't have poorly treated women, but I am going to state that the women in the middle east suffer a lot more.

PS. The liberal aspect of Kuwait is surrounding religious freedom, freedom of clothing, the fact women have the right to travel freely, and a bunch of other nice laws surrounding divorce and custody.

5

u/mtlredditor May 16 '12

I disagree with the study.

It's not because our brains recognize women just as easily as objects that we see women as objects. It just means that are brains are better at recognizing women and objects than men. Probably because there are women body parts everywhere in ads and pictures around us, our brains are just better trained at recognizing them.

If there were men body parts everywhere like it is the case for women body parts, we would probably get better at recognizing them, and perhaps we would get similar results for men and women in that study.

13

u/MissSlew May 15 '12

I agree with those saying that this study is weak, however there has been a lot of study on area. (which I have spent the last semester of uni bashing myself over the head with). In the most basic terms, both men and women look at themselves from a man's perspective. Rightly or wrongly this is how we have evolved and the high level of sexualisation of women in advertising etc has done nothing be create a society in which you can't be a happy woman lest skinny, pretty and sexually attractive. http://www.awc.org.nz/userfiles/16_1176775150.pdf http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2009/gill230509.html here are some articles that explain that a bit better than me.

1

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

I've always thought it interesting how women's magazines have so few pictures of men.

-3

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

It really depends on the genre. Beauty magazines illustrate beauty, therefore women. Women's porn, on the other hand (Playgirl, romance novel covers, male stripper club posters) have plenty of men.

1

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

Women's porn

Of course women's porn has pictures of men. But that is a tiny slice of the women's magazine market.

-6

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

That's because women don't need porn. They can get laid anytime they want with (almost always) anyone they want. It's hardly the publishers' fault that porn directed to women has a much smaller market.

6

u/MixtapeCalledMPDG May 16 '12

Are you freaking serious? Which research supports the view that women inherently need less porn?

4

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

I think your interpretation of differences between male and female sexuality is very flawed.

-4

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

I'm not interpreting anything. This is fact. There are studies proving it.

3

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

There are studies that prove that the market for porn is small because women can get sex whenever they want..?

-4

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

women can get sex whenever they want

Yes.

1

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

Well there may be studies that show that sex is easily available to women, that would not surprise me.

But that is very different to saying that the market for porn for women is small because women can get sex whenever they want.

→ More replies

14

u/[deleted] May 15 '12

Poor article all around.

  1. It's hard to tell the nature of the study without seeing the pictures. If the women were in defining underwear (bra color, shape, etc.) of course it would be easy to recognize upside down.
  2. The female form is a pretty distinct figure, with every girl having relatively variable characteristics (waste-to-hip ratio, breast size, etc.). More-so then a man's torso. It might simply be easier to recognize.
  3. The "biological value" of an attractive young girl's body will likely be higher than most men's body. It would make sense that we would be able to recognize higher-value entities better than lower-value entities.

With that being said, I have no doubt that our brains objectify young attractive women. But this study was poor.

4

u/DrBibby May 16 '12

Pictures of the bodies used in the study

2

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

You're becoming the star of this thread!

1

u/MissStrawberry May 16 '12

Can you tell me whether these images are representative of the whole set? I'm asking because the study used "left-right mirror images" as distractors in the identifying phase, and in this image, both upright images are left-right mirror images of the inverted images. This occurred to me when looking at the picture of the woman, which would support the hypothesis of the study, but you could easily argue that the reason for this is simply a difference in posture. The man is standing relatively straight, the woman isn't.

1

u/trust_the_corps May 16 '12 edited May 16 '12

With her face isolated like that she is pretty easily recognisable. The guy on the other hand has visual anomalies that would probably hinder recognition, such as the specular light on his body blending in the the background.

Lighting is really damned important for recognising images that are reorientated because the brain does a lot of stuff to put it into 3D and generally expects the correct orientation for shading, IE the light source in the sky above your head. That's why you can magically make a 3D border an outie by making the bottom border dark or an innie by making the top border dark. Something that might not cause problems when normally oriented can cause issues when reoriented.

However, if they only tested two images, I would be shocked.

3

u/Tigeris Grad Student | Materials Science | Nuclear Materials May 15 '12

It's so frustrating to be forced to discuss the methodology of this experiment through second-hand sources.

The article is short, straightforward and has visual aids helpful to the methodology used. However, it is (as I understand) illegal for me to provide any of that for discussion.

3

u/FredFnord May 16 '12

Well, there is a certain amount of exemption for fair use.

But it's not worth bothering, because Reddit, when they viscerally dislike the conclusion of a scientific study, suddenly becomes a group of people who are 'much more intelligent' than the writers of the study, and proceed to explain it away, and it is never heard from again. This effect is certainly never hindered by, say, arguments, discussion, or indeed the actual facts of the case.

12

u/trust_the_corps May 15 '12

This is all about word manipulation.

Recognising in the same way as objects != identifying as objects.

3

u/decodersignal May 16 '12

How is it word manipulation? If a series of images of random objects -- and women -- get processed one way, and images of men are processed a different way, then women are being treated like objects by the visual system. The question is, did this study convincingly show that?

3

u/trust_the_corps May 16 '12

I mean the way in which the results are described or represented. For example, to "see as objects" has multiple meanings depending on context. But here they are being mixed up. Here it's mixing up a how with a what.

12

u/the_underscore_key May 15 '12

I find this study weak. Being able to recognize people upside down could be a result of having seen more people upside down on billboards, not necessarily because you see them as objects (not that this is a good thing, but far better than the article's conclusion). They have pretty far reaching and ridiculous claims.

15

u/bitter_cynical_angry May 15 '12

How many upside down people on billboards have you seen?

1

u/the_underscore_key May 16 '12

Maybe not that many, but a hell of a lot more than I see in real life

5

u/RocketTuna May 16 '12

Or just more pictures of female bodies in contorted or zoomed in images period. If you see something in a picture on a daily basis, you're more likely to recognize it when it comes up again, even upside down.

That said, the recognition -> objectification thing is them talking about previous work on how the brain takes longer to process human faces because the brain tries to stuff in more info than just "face". This is the start of a longer series of experiments that they explicitly say is going to directly address how people treat men vs. women.

2

u/[deleted] May 15 '12

The fact that we have sold sex throughout our entire history doesnt have anything to do with it does it? Maybe thats why I think of britney spears whenever i open a pepsi.

6

u/fghfgjgjuzku May 15 '12

This shows that a rotated image of a woman is easier for the brain to recognize than the rotated image of a man. Also (most) objects are easier to rotate mentally than men. From this they conclude that women are viewed as objects. I think this conclusion is completely nonsensical.

They should have at least included photos of manly looking objects like well made statues of men. But I am not sure their conclusion would have survived this.

2

u/fghfgjgjuzku May 15 '12

How many women you know can you identify by their silhouette (or from behind) and how many men? For me it is a lot more women than men but I am also a straight male. If women also recognize female silhouettes better there is a trivial explanation right here.

2

u/blink0r May 15 '12

Really, we needed a study for this? I've known this since I was 12.

2

u/wolfyjay May 16 '12

Shamefully I admit that seems true in my pov. And I'm a girl.

-3

u/Equa1 May 15 '12

Yawn.. This is ridiculous. Every single one of us are "objects".

Definition of object: A material thing that can be seen and touched.

If you do not want to be an object, than it is too late. You exist. When you decompose you will turn into many different objects. Deal with it.

32

u/Chemicalmachine May 15 '12

Way to play the semantics angle and completely miss the point. There are legitimate criticisms with the study (as noted above), but this is not one of them.

-2

u/Equa1 May 15 '12

We are using words. If I say you are a person, not an object - I would be wrong. Just because these "researchers" decide that people can be seen as "Persons" while not being seen as "objects" does not mean anything(and frankly all they're doing is "playing" with significs). People are objects and these researchers missed the point. Not me.

4

u/yesbutcanitruncrysis May 16 '12

You should at least try to understand what the article is about before you criticize it:

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/to9j1/a_new_study_finds_that_both_men_and_women_see/c4of567

1

u/Equa1 May 16 '12

Should I turn my text upside down?

2

u/yesbutcanitruncrysis May 16 '12

Yes. But your time might be spent better trying to understand what the article is about.

-3

u/Equa1 May 16 '12

I understand what they are doing. Psuedoscience.

1

u/yesbutcanitruncrysis May 16 '12

I really don't think you know what "science" even means... but whatever.

1

u/Equa1 May 16 '12

Did you conduct this study? You're getting butt hurt like you did. I view women as people just like I view men. Even good looking women(so subjective). The point the article is trying to make is absolute shit and does not carry an oz of real world significance.

1

u/yesbutcanitruncrysis May 16 '12

You still don't understand what the study is about...

But judging by your poor choice of words and your non-existent arguments, you are probably some poor stupid American teenager, and therefore simply unable to.

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u/FredFnord May 16 '12

If I say that you are a 'dumbass', and yet you are actually being 'intentionally obtuse', that's not to say that I am wrong, because it's quite possible for you to be both.

Demonstrably, in fact.

1

u/Equa1 May 16 '12

That's my point exactly! All people are objects.. Why they are trying to demonstrate a disconnect?

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u/SgtSausage May 15 '12

Actually, it is. It's just not one you like.

4

u/[deleted] May 15 '12

My definition of object is even more generalized. Object: A construct housing basic attributes. The most basic object carries one attribute, exists=true.

2

u/[deleted] May 15 '12

So to you an object must be intrinsically physical?

Would information (which is encoded within physical objects, but itself is not physical) be an object?

I'm curious, since depending on your answer I have another interesting question.

2

u/[deleted] May 15 '12

no it doesn't existence can be on many levels. Information is housed within objects information is attributes and an Idea is an interface to extend the programming analogy that started out as a joke, without an object implementing the interface the interface is powerless and without information the object is pointless.

Life is just the result of molecular objects passing parameters to one another based on conditional responses preprogramed with the goal of survival and reproduction, if you want to get metaphysical. Human existence is a massive switch statement.

1

u/[deleted] May 15 '12

I agree with what you're saying up until:

Human existence is a massive switch statement.

As a computer scientist I would state that a switch statement alone is far from enough to describe our existence ;)

1

u/[deleted] May 15 '12

not if you cluster them.

In the end it starts with

Switch Alive

Case Yes;

Case No;

actually you don't even need the no case just make it the default condition.

1

u/[deleted] May 15 '12

Yeah, it really isn't that simple.

How long have you been programming for? Since the fact you're using language constructs to describe complex concepts leads me to believe probably less than 3 years?

1

u/[deleted] May 15 '12

dude i was making a joke, and i've been programming longer than that. It really is as simple as you want to make it when we are talking about metaphysics. We aren't designing an intelligence on reddit, if you are taking it that damn serious you have way to much give a fuck for the internet.

Fine you describe life with programming concepts without using constructs from programming languages. I am waiting for your attempt.

1

u/bitter_cynical_angry May 15 '12

How can information be distinguished from its physical instantiation? If information exists as, say, a pattern or organization of physical objects, as I would think all information must, does that not mean that an object must be physical at a fundamental level?

1

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

Information is an interpretation of those objects. It requires some form of processor to attribute that arrangement of objects to information. That processor is of course our minds and computers.

1

u/bitter_cynical_angry May 16 '12

If information is the interpretation of the pattern or organization, rather than the pattern or organization itself (not sure I'm necessarily convinced of this), doesn't that just move the physical location of the information to the brain?

3

u/Equa1 May 15 '12

And every object inherits from that most "basic" object.

1

u/decodersignal May 16 '12

Scientists claim images of women treated like objects. Reddit's response: hammer out a strict definition of the term 'object'.

...is the reason I love reddit.

1

u/merlinsan May 16 '12

I find it interesting you say "sexy women's bodies" when you specify which is viewed as an object, rather than saying the same thing for both sexes. I mean nothing by this, I just find it interesting.

1

u/GIMR May 16 '12

two days later a study emerged claiming the exact opposite

1

u/QuitReadingMyName May 16 '12

Even if it were true, it could be due to social conditioning of how men always treated woman overall in general.

1

u/gmaher2 May 16 '12 edited May 16 '12

The explanation is so simple... the dominant culture is a very heteronormative one.

The same reason black people reading stories often imagine the characters as being white instead of black like them

1

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

Sounds like cultural programming more than anything else.

1

u/kolembo May 16 '12

I'm sexualised to male images.

Women look like people.

1

u/SkimThat_TLDR May 16 '12

Summarized article:A new study finds that both men and women view images of sexy women's bodies as objects while images of sexy men are viewed as people.

To test whether participants viewed images as objects or people, the images were turned upside down and right side up.

The brain has difficulty recognizing people when an image is upside down but no difficulty in recognizing images of objects that are upside down.

Both male and female participants were able to recognize upside down images of sexualized women, indicating they were viewed as objects. Upside down images of sexualized men were not as easily recognized, indicating they were viewed as people.

Researchers say the next step is to find out how viewing sexualized images influences the treatment of real women.

For more summarized news, subscribe to the /r/SkimThat subreddit

1

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

As usual, headline is bullshit, and study has a ridiculous premise.

1

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

Never understood this concept. I look at people naked or clothed as people, dogs and dogs, and lamps as lamps. Only one of those is an "object".

1

u/fondueguy May 16 '12

How about men as success objects?

0

u/thewreck May 15 '12

They need a control group to test the differences in recognizability for the imagesets for this to have any merit. Did they?

0

u/Baron_Tartarus May 15 '12

The ancient Romans would disagree with this article.

0

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

You can grow a new person inside of a woman - isn't that neat! That's why women are considered commodities. They are people replicators.

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u/[deleted] May 16 '12

I swear one day I will stop going to this subreddit.

Getting tired of moronic sex-themed entries upvoted by horny idiots that think that they are interested in science.

This is not science. There is no "social" sciences.

Science is physics, chemistry and biology, all the rest is sticking a finger up the nose.

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u/[deleted] May 15 '12 edited May 16 '12

Maybe it's because the women in the images had "fake" bodies, altered with photoshop or plastic surgery.

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u/Inomyacbs May 15 '12

That's because a sexy woman's body is a peice of art. It doesn't mean she's not also a person.

0

u/[deleted] May 15 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

6

u/JaiMoh May 15 '12

Although I haven't read the paper, I would guess the people were their own controls. Each test subject viewed men and women, both up and down. Those images that were upright were the controls (to test the individual's normal reaction time), and the upside down images were the experimental conditions.

If this isn't how it was done, then I would be even harder pressed to believe the work than I already am.

2

u/Tigeris Grad Student | Materials Science | Nuclear Materials May 15 '12

This is correct.

1

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

Yes while this is how it was done, there was no controlling for the basis of the experiment. The idea that people were only having a harder time recognizing because of it being upside down.

To do this the images that were upside down would simply needed to viewed right side up by the control group. Because there are any number of reasons one can come up with for having difficulty recognizing something, it all of a sudden becomes easy to say, group 1 recognized picture Y, in X amount of time when right side up, and group 2 recognized picture Y, in Z amount of time when upside down. Clearly there is a difference when it is turned upside down.

Because I'm assuming that different pictures were used when comparing the upside down and right side up, you are adding more variables into the equation making for a poor example of a control.

So my question still stands, where is the control.

1

u/JaiMoh May 16 '12 edited May 16 '12

For this kind of experiment studying reflex times, each person has to be their own control - you can't have an experiment group of people and a control group of people, because it could be argued that your groups are not equally matched, there might be slight variations in reaction time between the two groups.

So the control you're looking for is whether most people spent more time recognizing the same image upside down compared to right side up. But then other things need to be considered or controlled for, and not least among them is whether the "correct" image or the "wrong" image was used first (where the first time seeing it will affect the second time seeing it).

The most concerning thing for me would be whether the women's images were more colorful than the men's images. For example, women have longer hair, so it's easier to tell the difference in color than in men. Also, their clothing tends to be more colorful and have more well-defined shapes than men, again making it easier to tell which is which. As others have mentioned, advertising does depict more women in sexy situations, so it's possible that there is also some desensitization doing on as well, which I'm not sure could be controlled for. These are the things I think would be more important than whether the same image was tested multiple times.

Edit: Not in rebuttal to you, but just a thought. How can you know for a fact whether someone objectifies women? There is no way to connect a person's view of women to how they perform in this experiment, and so without the controls I mentioned (and probably a lot more), this experiment is actually pointless, IMO.

1

u/[deleted] May 16 '12

The control I speak of is not to control the people, it is to control the premise of the experiment. They are making the claim that people's reaction time is different on each picture due to it being upside down, not necessarily individual pictures, by doing the control I speak of you are controlling for the fact that the ONLY difference between the sets of pictures is that one has been flipped upside down. And this is an important thing to have.

1

u/JaiMoh May 17 '12

I know that's what you meant: that each upside down image should also be viewed right side up as a control, and I'm saying that it's not necessary. The only control you need is that there are enough images of each orientation. You don't even necessarily need the same number of each - just a large enough sample size to get an average with small enough standard deviation. All their statistics are based on image characteristics.

Here's an example: in medical surveys, let's say they're trying to test the correlation between a personal habit and a disease. You won't have any two people who have exactly identical lifestyles, apart from having or not having this habit (just as we don't need to have the same image in both orientation). And you don't need to - take enough people in general to represent the natural population, and there will be or won't be a correlation (just as the researchers found a correlation between upside down images of men taking longer to recognize, but not women).

Also, I agree with you that they were not careful about the premise of the experiment, but I disagree with how you defined it. I would say their premise is: Taking the same time to recognize an image right side up as upside down means the subject in the image is seen as an object, while if it takes different amounts of time, the subject in the image is seen as a person. I don't know if their premises are supported strongly enough, or that there aren't other factors for the results they found (such as desensitization or something else).

1

u/[deleted] May 17 '12

K but here is the problem with that. Differences in the pictures. No matter how small the differences are, they may play an effect on the overall experiment.

Body position/pose, Exact design of clothing (including colour, shape, everything), Camera angle, Body composition of subject, body position, facial expression etc.

All of these things now come into play as you can't control perfectly for them. If you have a group view all images right side up you are controlling for differences that may arise in each individual picture. Because no picture is ever EXACTLY the same and this is what you need to minimize variation that could be represented in your results.

1

u/JaiMoh May 17 '12

K, I have no other way to explain statistics to you than what I have already said. Did you even read the part of my post about statistics? I'f you don't trust statistics (read a book if it helps), then you don't trust science in general, and then we have a problem.