Men really do see scantily-clad women as objects!

Yep, and we all know that child "pornography" pictures are just "icons" and do no damage and have no real power to dehumanize or galvanize actions!

You don't understand, so let me help you.

Magritte's point was that a painting of a pipe is a representation.  It is not a pipe.  It's a placeholder for a pipe.

Similarly, an image of a person is not a person.  If you really can't understand that then the school system failed you.

I don't think that is what is being asserted. The question as I understand it is does the mind act differently when viewing a person than it does when viewing a representation of a person? I don't know the answer to the question. Maybe a neurologist would know.

You appear to have farted.

Quote:

So an image of child being sexually abused means they are not a person to you?

The person is a person to me. The image is not.

Why is the question being raised so controversial to some in this thread?

Silly question...but are there any similiar studies that compare the reaction of a male to a picture of a scantily clad objectified woman vs. an in-person scantily clad (and still objectified) woman?

I'd also be curious if there was a distinction between a males response to a photo of a female they don't know (or don't recognize) vs a picture of a scantily clad friend. 

Based entirely on the information presented in this thread and the NG article, I'm not sure that any particularly solid conclusions can be drawn. I realise that running tests on this kind of equipment can be prohibitively expensive, but to attempt to draw conclusions about "males" as a result of a test group that includes only 21 subjects seems to me to be unfair. We also know very little about the design of the study itself. The full study may very well prove the things the article says it does, but we don't have nearly enough information right now to know that.

Anyway, doesn't this study strike anyone as kind of ludicrous? It's a 'scientific' study trying to probe what social scientists and cultural theorists have taken for granted for centuries. In fact, even the findings--that men think of 'tools and first-person action verbs'--need to be stretched a bit to fit the social theory of objectification. What is the new information the study is supposed to uncover?

Catchfire wrote:

Anyway, doesn't this study strike anyone as kind of ludicrous? It's a 'scientific' study trying to probe what social scientists and cultural theorists have taken for granted for centuries. In fact, even the findings--that men think of 'tools and first-person action verbs'--need to be stretched a bit to fit the social theory of objectification. What is the new information the study is supposed to uncover?

The lines between disciplines are socially constructed, and are not completely based on truth. If truth is what we're after we'll sometimes have multiple disciplines pursuing the same question.

Here are some reasons why this is worth doing:

1) The psychological and the neurological tests are both independent tests, yet they are statistically equivalent in their result as they show men who are "hostile sexist" indeed do respond differently to women;

The agreement is a verdict of confidence in both psychology and neurology.

2) A lot of things which "social scientists and cultural theorists" took for granted later turned out to be false. Are you not familiar with the unparalleled tragedy that is the David Reimer story?

A certain degree of confidence is now acquired in these psychological tests that identify "hostile sexists". It could have been that all men have nearly identical attitudes, and that they merely interpret the questions differently. That's a serious intrinsic problem with questionnaires and psychologists rely on questionnaires for many things.

3) Sometimes it is worth checking things you think are obvious if nobody has checked them before - because your belief might be wrong.

4) Look at all the criticisms this thread has attracted from educated laymen. Imagine what it might attract from real neuroscientists and researchers... this can inform future studies.

According to the criticism levelled by you and snert, hostile sexists are objectifying images of women because the images are object. A prediction of your belief is that they exhibit a different neurological reaction as more elements are added, you can add the woman's voice, or make it a movie. The belief that you and probably many people hold can now be put under the gun of empirical study.

Edited, previous version had some superfluous comments.

Its interesting how nay-sayers have managed to filter out the empirical elements that diasgree with their simplifications, e.g. a seat-of-the-pants notions of objectification.

The ones that most stand out for me are the fact that Fiske's study used pictures of both men and women, with a range of clothing levels. So the observed variation had nothing to do with image vs. "real" person. Another is that two of the hypotheses explored by Fiske and her colleagues applied not just to hostile sexists but to all male subjects. So much for the asttempt to invalidate th study on the basis of that catgeory. The mentalization interruption oberved with pictures of less-clothed women was more pronouced among men scoring high on the hostile sexism scale; it will be interesting to look at how that is analyzed in the full study, once it is peer-reviewed. Meanwhile here is the "lay summary" which the author sent to 500 Apples. The manuscript can't be circulated, but I understand that this summary can. 

I hope it will make it a bit harder to snow-job these findings. Male cherry-pickers, at your marks...

From Subjects to Objects:
Sexist Attitudes and Neural Responses to Sexualized Targets

Mina Cikara
Princeton University

Jennifer L. Eberhardt
Stanford University

Susan T. Fiske
Princeton University

When do we treat other people as tools? Our overarching question for this program of research is how people can objectify another person, treating the person instrumentally, as in effect a tool. As a first step in this line of research, we examine the impact of sexual instrumentality and sexist attitudes on memory for and neural responses to passively viewed images of men and women, sexualized and fully clothed. We use questionnaire, memory, and fMRI methods.
Our first hypothesis was that the pictured people's gender and level of dress, as a manipulation of instrumentality, should influence memory. Specifically, if sexualized women serve some potentially instrumental function, they should be better recognized than the other three kinds of images. And, indeed, heterosexual men, in a surprise memory test, were significantly better at recognizing bikini-clad female bodies (with the heads removed), than they were at recognizing any of the other three types of images or any kind of faces.
Second, some objects are mentally represented not only as what they are useful for, but how they are physically used. We predicted that viewing sexualized female images would activate brain regions that have previously been identified as responding more to action-associated objects, like tools, as compared to other sorts of non-human entities. We were particularly interested to see if any regions that responded more to sexualized women as compared to the other three types of images would correlate with participants' ability to remember sexualized female images. As predicted, neuroimaging data demonstrated that memory for sexualized women's bodies correlated with activation areas previously associated with tool-use or manipulable objects (premotor cortex, posterior middle temporal gyrus). That is, greater activity in these premotor areas predicted better recognition. We did not observe this memory-motor relationship for other types of images.
Finally, we predicted that if in fact sexualized women were seen more like instruments, then looking at them should affect activity in areas associated with social cognition. In particular, we focused on areas implicated in people considering other people's thoughts and feelings, a phenomenon termed mentalizing. Because participants with high hostile sexism scores have previously been shown to see women as less human, we predicted that hostile sexists might especially neglect the minds of sexualized women. As predicted, hostile sexism predicted less activation of otherwise reliable social cognition networks (mPFC, posterior cingulate, and bilateral temporal poles) in response to looking at bikini-clad women. This implicates more hostile attitudes in predicting deactivation of the mentalizing network, consistent with viewing sexualized women as less human.
Although all these findings require follow-up, they fit other work showing that people can treat others as less than fully human, depending on their goals for engaging (or not engaging) them.

It is "offensive" to note that most opponents of Fiske's conclusions are male? I find that comment rather sexist.

As to whether these nay-sayers are cherry-picking, I think it is a reasonable observation, if debatable. Feel free to offer a more substantive critique.

Because I for one am utterly disinterested in your attempts at personal attacks.

In terms of people viewing pictures of people as objects this is not true. I will try and link up studies later tonight but that is one of the big differences with people with (high functioning) autism, when shown pictures of people the areas associated with objects light up, with typical developing people different areas to do with socialization (such as facial recognition and emotion) light up.

Edited to add links to info about some studies:

http://opa.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=3428

http://cbc.ucsd.edu/pdf/Autism_Roy_Soc_01.pdf

http://www.citeulike.org/user/brendan1/article/4498537

That isn't the one I had in mind.  The painting I'm thinking about is so lacking in subtlety that it seems like an obvious image to have been brought up in this thread.

Quote:

But rather than such extreme caricatural examples, what I like about the Fiske experiment is that it eschews gross "witticism" or hostile 'arty' braggadacio to open our eyes to a simple, pre-conscious, neural association in this culture between the level of female skin shown and male insensitivity to females as sentient, wilful subjects.

So basically you're giving males the licence to club women over the head and drag them into their caves to be raped because we're too primitive to see women in any other way.

hang on gurls, i'm knockin' back a 2-4 and a-comin' to git ya!

The assertion that 'men treat women like objects' regardless of its empirical validity has historically been used as an insult towards men. My initial response to the Fiske study may have been conditioned by this history, since I am a man. 

I appreciate that the results of the study may have been sensationalized to play to that history, distracting us from their real utility.

I accept Martin's clarifications, in post 72, regarding the distinction between image and actual stimulus and regarding the instrumentalist impulse in all men and not just a 'hostile' subset.

Much of sexual behavior is hardwired and carried over from our pre-human past. While I'm happy to submit mine to the requirements of civilized society, I'm damned if I'm going to feel embarrassed about a fundamentally natural behavior. When I as heterosexual male look at a woman some part of me instinctively performs a set of judgements to determine her potential as a sexual partner. It doesn't matter that I have a partner and am not looking for another. The brain automatically runs the subroutine, and all I can do is constrain it to comply with social norms.

These judgements are regarded as vulgar (instrumentalist) in polite company - can I mate with this female - since they relate to the physical mechanics of copulation. They are chiefly concerned with the woman's secondary sexual characteristics.

THAT'S WHY SHE HAS THEM.

remind wrote:

That is quite the freakin leap merowe in order to say basically; "it does not matter what men do, it is hard wired for us to do it, as such we are hostages to our "natural behaviour " from our prehuman past !

I wonder what types of cameras we used before we were human?

hee hee! well remind, I think its a bit of a freakin' leap to get to 'we are hostages to our "natural behavior"' from my post. I think that's a little reductionist? 

I think your question about the pre-human camera is apropos since debate around the evolution of the eye featured so prominently in discussion of Mr. Darwin's outlandish new book. Some time ago now.  Our 'eye' is a camera since it gives us all the tools we need to record photo-resolution data of the environment. It evolved from some protozoan light sensing organ, I suppose. And I wouldn't say our eye is the same as that.

But when I survey the complex of what I take to be fairly innate or deepseated human sexual behaviors - at the root of which is, ahem, rooting - we come with an operating system already installed, no? Or does nature leave it up to each generation to figure that out on its own? What are these strange bits for, etc...

And culture intercedes at some point - after we have already integrated complex social dynamics including sexual into our overly developed monkey brains - and shrouds it in further veils. But it also equips us with the 'tools' to direct these behaviors productively, maybe?

martin dufresne wrote:

Here comes that pathetic "hardwiring" trope again, human beings arguing they're machines...

Identifying a neural process in no way signifies that it is "natural", i.e. unchallengeable. Mackinnon makes the interesting point that we ought to explore whether culturally-reiterated patterns such as the sexual objectification of women do not end up, as does any form of education, modifying biology, in this case by imprinting itself in neural processes, turning off empathy circuits.

When Hitler was using pornography during WWII to turn off empathy circuits, it was already understood that it could be done. But now, for some, 60 years later, we are supposed to excuse it as "hard wiring" from our prehuman days.

What? The first sentence is: 'How people can objectify another person'.  martin, you would do well to adjust the way you attack people, especially when you decide not to read their posts.

You have no idea what you are talking about. I am at a loss for words.

well 'object' is definitely out there, I think #84 gets it right...and perhaps it IS a distraction but the (ahem) instrumental role of mediated imagery in this culture seems a pertinent variable here.

k, thanks, am going to think about this for awhile and come back to it.

The only solution to be found it seems, is to lobotomize all males at an appropriate age, regardless of sexual preferences, to render impossible evolutionary visual stimulation as being the cause for objectifying their persuasions.  Better yet, and infinitely more cost effective than surgery, a hot poker to the eyes would do just as well.  And for those getting on in life without having undergone the procedure, who still insist on thumbing through the underwear pages of the weekly flyers, male or female sections according to want, turn yourselves in.

Sure, got another million years?

You're saying it took society a million years to develop?  Not sure if you're catching my point...this isn't biological, it's social.