Men see bikini-clad women as objects: Psychologists

It may seem pretty obvious to say that men perceive women in sexy bathing suits as objects, But now there's actual scientific evidence to back it up.

New research shows that, in men, the brain areas associated with handling tools and the intention to perform actions light up when viewing images of women in bikinis.

The research was presented this week by Susan Fiske, professor of psychology at Princeton University, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"This is just the first study which was focused on the idea that men of a certain age view sex as a highly desirable goal, and if you present them with a provocative woman, then that will tend to prime goal-related responses," she says.

Although consistent with conventional wisdom, the way that men may depersonalize sexual images of women is not entirely something they control. In fact, it's a byproduct of human evolution, experts say. The first male humans had an incentive to seek fertile women as the means of spreading their genes.

"They're not fully conscious responses, and so people don't know the extent to which they're being influenced," Fiske said. "It's important to recognize the effects."

The participants, 21 heterosexual male undergraduates at Princeton University, took questionnaires to determine whether they harbor "benevolent" sexism, which includes the belief that a woman's place is in the home, or hostile sexism, a more adversarial viewpoint which includes the belief that women attempt to dominate men.

In the men who scored highest on hostile sexism, the part of the brain associated with analyzing another person's thoughts, feelings and intentions was inactive while viewing scantily clad women, Fiske said.

Men also remember these women's bodies better than those of fully-clothed women, Fiske said. Each image was shown for only a fraction of a second.

This study looked specifically at men, and did not test women's responses to similar images.

A supplementary study on both male and female undergraduates found that men tend to associate bikini-clad women with first-person action verbs such as I "push," "handle" and "grab" instead of the third-person forms such as she "pushes," "handles" and "grabs." They associated fully clothed women, on the other hand, with the third-person forms, indicating these women were perceived as in control of their own actions. "The females who took the test did not show this effect," Fiske said.

"That goes along with the idea that the man looking at a woman in a bikini sees her as the object of action," Fiske said.

The findings are consistent with previous work in the field, and resonate, for example, with the abundance of female strip clubs in comparison to male strip clubs, said Dr. Charles Raison, psychiatrist and director of the Mind/Body Institute at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Raison was not involved in the study.

Previous research found that people tend to similarly dehumanize those who are homeless or drug addicts, although the phenomenon in this case is somewhat different, Fiske said. People have reactions of avoidance toward the homeless and drug addicts, and the opposite for scantily clad women.

The broader purpose of the research was to explore circumstances under which people treat one another as the means to an end, Fiske said.

Past studies have also shown that when men view images of highly sexualized women, and then interact with a woman in a separate setting, they are more likely to have sexual words on their minds, she said. They are also more likely to remember the woman's physical appearance, and sit closer to her -- for instance, at a job interview.

"Taken together, the research suggests that viewing certain images is not appropriate in the workplace," Fiske said.

"I'm not advocating censorship, but I do think people need to know what settings should discourage the display and possession of these kinds of things," she said.

"Both women and men have something to learn from this line of research," Raison said. "Women should be aware of how they are perceived when wearing provocative clothing, and men shouldn't let feelings of impersonal sexual longing interfere with their more personal relationships with other women, including female friends. "Many men make foolish choices because of sexual attraction," he said.

"The suggestion might be that there's some hard-wiring there that can interfere with the average man's ability to interact on deeper levels with really hot looking stranger women in bikinis," he said.

Women may also depersonalize men in certain situations, but published research on the subject has not been done, experts say. Evolutionary psychology would theorize that men view women as objects in terms of their youth and apparent fertility, while women might view men as instrumental in terms of their status and resources, Fiske said. Another avenue to explore would be showing images of men's wives and girlfriends in bikinis, Raison said. He predicts the objectifying effect would not happen in this context.

Why you can't always make good decisions

We all make bad decisions sometimes. In some contexts, to a certain extent, psychologists know why.
Much research on the subject was done by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for their models of how intuitive reasoning is flawed in predictable ways. Kahneman is now professor emeritus at Princeton University, and Tversky died in 1996.

But other researchers are working on showing that, when it comes to more basic judgments, we're not so bad.

Research in the current issue of the journal Neuron offers a mathematical model for how people make decisions about visual stimuli on a computer screen. They found that humans make accurate judgments about cues they can see.

"We're discovering that humans aren't so stupid after all," said Alexandre Pouget, co-author of the study and associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester in New York.

Participants were asked to look at moving dots on a screen. Many of the dots moved randomly, but some moved in one clear direction. Researchers found that people very quickly realized which way the non-random dots were going.

The work complements that of Kahneman and Tversky in that it shows humans are good at lower-level, nonlinguistic tasks, while perhaps not so good at higher-level probability problems involving words, he said.

"In simple perceptual decisions -- you have a visual stimulus on the screen and you have to make decisions about it -- it looks like you do accumulate the evidence optimally, given that uncertainty," Pouget said.

Psychologists believe the human mind has two systems for decision-making: intuitive and reasoning. The intuitive system is emotional, fast, automatic but slow-learning, while the reasoning system is emotionally-neutral, slow, controlled, and rule-governed. Neither, of course, is always right, but there are certain simple problems that reveal flaws in intuition.

A classic example that Kahneman has often used in lectures is this math problem: A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Your intuitive system may quickly tell you that the ball costs 10 cents. That would be an easy solution, but it would also be incorrect.

In fact, if the ball costs 10 cents, that would mean the bat costs $1.10, so the two together would be $1.20 -- violating the first piece of information you had. A little algebra, or a little more thought, reveals that the ball must have cost 5 cents. Oops!!.

Now, think about tossing a coin six times. Which is more likely: heads-heads-heads-tails-tails-tails or tails-tails-heads-heads-tails-heads?

You might think that the second one seems more random, so it's more likely. That error would fall into what Kahneman and Tversky would call the representativeness heuristic or, more specifically, the misconception of chance -- in other words, we tend to go on our intuitive notions of what an unrigged coin toss should look like rather than actually calculating.

If you think about the probabilities of each, you'll realize the two combinations are equally likely.

A related concept is called fundamental attribution error, demonstrated by Edward Jones and Victor Harris in 1967. The researchers gave people texts, some of which opposed Fidel Castro and some of which supported him. Most subjects said the writers held the beliefs expressed in the essay, even after the experimenters told them that an instructor or experimenter had previously dictated the essay's stance to the writer. The point is that the subjects did not take into the account all of the situational factors when making a decision about the writers' attitudes.

Intuition is not always wrong. Expert chess players, for example, develop extraordinary speed in making moves, and learn to instantly recognize the available moves and strategies based on the board. Team sports players operate in much the same way.

There are, however, limits to what intuition can offer. Experts say it's important to distinguish between decisions that should be made by intuition and those that require careful calculation.

"With respect to accuracy, it all depends on the nature of the decision. I would not rely on my gut judgment when picking stock options for my retirement portfolio, for example," said Alexander Todorov, assistant professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University.

Some of the most remarkable mental feats are done entirely without awareness, such as color vision, said Eldar Shafir, professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University. Other tasks require more effort, with less impressive results -- for example, humans can't navigate as well as a honeybee, which has a brain the size of the head of a pin.

Todorov and Shafir both said the conclusions of Pouget's moving dot study -- that people make good decisions about certain perceptual problems -- make sense.

"We -- like every other biological organism -- do some things remarkably well, and often unbeknownst to us. Other things, we do remarkably badly, even if we might think -- sometimes with great confidence -- otherwise," Shafir said.