Who treats others as sex objects? Toward a better understanding of sexual objectification

By: RIPS - IRSP Blog on 11:32 PM

     A year ago, the video “10 Hours of Walking Through New York City” showing a woman walking through the streets of New York City while a hidden camera recorded the considerable number of catcalls, intrusive gaze and harassment she experienced, went viral. Today, it has been viewed over 40 millions times since it was posted online and inspired numerous copycats, tributes and parodies from all over the world. Experiencing the fact of being considered as a body before being considered as a person is what we could call “sexual objectification”. 

 

     If objectification is the process of depicting or treating a person like an object, sexual objectification is the process of depicting or treating a person like a “sex object”, through which the sexual attributes and physical attractiveness are isolated from the rest of the individual and its personality. Being appraised in terms of one’s appearance, in contexts in which appearance is not, or shouldn’t be, relevant participates in the sexual objectification of a person. In such irrelevant contexts, referring to someone as “a nice piece of ass” is a spoken case. Media is often pointed out for its participation in the objectification of women and men, depicting them in sexualized ways in order to sell or draw attention.

 

Source: shutterstock 

 

     Even though this phenomenon is more prevalent against women than men, previous research has shown that both men and women objectify others and report objectifying experiences (and its negative outcomes) from others. Considering these facts, one may wonder: who treats people as sex objects, and what are the processes that are implicated in the objectification of others? These are the questions that a study conducted by Gervais, Bernard and Riemer, published in the International Review of Social Psychology (IRSP), attempted to address. Rather than examining these tendencies through explanations highlighting sex differences, this investigation focused on individual differences to bring out the factors predicting sexual objectification of others.

Local versus global processing and its association with cultural orientation within individuals

     To establish their hypotheses, the authors inspired from a large body of literature in cognitive psychology suggesting that “global processing” underlies person recognition, whereas “local processing” underlies body parts recognition. In this perspective, if an individual is sexually objectified, people should focus on individual body parts rather than on the person as a whole. In this sense, local processing should contribute to the sexual body part recognition bias (cf. Gervais, Bernard, Klein, & Allen, 2013).
     In parallel, one construct that has been shown to be implicated with local and global processing is people’s cultural orientation that is individualism and collectivism. People with a collectivist orientation tend to be more interdependent and to focus on the global context, while people with an individualistic orientation tend to be more independent and to focus on the local features of the context. Combined with the individual preferences toward inequality and hierarchy acceptance (i.e., the “power distance” factor, an important factor in this particular case), these individual orientations result in four tendencies among individuals, that is vertical individualism (perceiving the self as an autonomous individual and recognizing inequality among individuals), vertical collectivism (perceiving the self as a part of a collective and recognizing inequality among individuals), horizontal individualism (perceiving the self as an autonomous individual and believing that equality between individuals is the ideal) and horizontal collectivism (perceiving the self as a part of a collective and believing that equality between individuals is the ideal).

Considering these aspects, Gervais, Bernard and Riemer examined throught their study the extent to which vertical individualism is the individual tendancy that would better predicts sexual objectification.

Vertical individualism as a predictor of objectification perpetration 

     Two hundred thirty two men and four hundred thirty eight women participated in this study conducted in a U.S. Midwestern University. Participants were invited to complete a battery of psychological measures. The “Cultural Orientation Scale” (COS ; Triandis & Gelfand, 1998) assessed individual differences in vertical and horizontal patterns of collectivism and individualism. The Scale for Social Comparison Orientation (Gibbons & Buunk, 1999) assessed the degree to which people compare to others and was added, as people recognizing inequality among individuals are more likely to compare themselves with others. Thus, the authors assumed social comparison to be an important mechanism of the link between vertical individualism and the tendency to engage in objectifying behaviors toward others. Lastly, the Interpersonal Sexual Objectification Scale (Gervais, DiLillo, & McChargue, 2014) assessed individual differences in sexual objectification perpetration.
Relations between these measurements were examined to determine the predictors of sexual objectification. Consistently with the author's assumptions, the results show that vertical individualism predicts objectification perpetration. In this

sense, individualism predicts sexual objectification only when it is associated with a focus on vertical power differentials (i.e., recognizing inequality among individuals). Furthermore, they find that social comparison processes are an important mediator of the link between vertical individualism and sexual objectification. These patterns emerged for the combined sample of men and women, but also for men and women separately.

What are the implications?

     This research consists of the first one conducted in the context of the local versus global processing model that identifies individual differences unrelated to biological sex but to cultural orientation among people. In this perspective, this represents an important step in better understanding sexual objectification and its mechanisms, to help guiding interventions to prevent its appearance and perpetration. Identifying the predictors and key mechanisms of sexual objectification is critical to stopping this phenomenon and its negative outcomes from occurring in every day life. 

_ 

Here you can see the some of the latest posts on this topic from Sarah J. Gervais’s blog on power and prejudice at “Psychology Today”:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/power-and-prejudice 

_

References

Gervais, S. J., Bernard, P., Klein, O., & Allen, J. (2013). Toward a unified theory of objectification and dehumanization. In S. J. Gervais (Ed.), Objectification and (De)Humanization (pp. 1-24). New York: Springer.

Gervais, S. J., Bernard, P., & Riemer, A. (2015). Who treats people as sex objects? Cultural orientation, social comparison, and sexual objectification perpetration. International Review of Social Psychology / Revue Internationale de Psychologie Sociale, 28(1), 153-181.

Gervais, S. J., DiLillo, D., & McChargue, D. (2014). Understanding the link between men’s alcohol use and sexual violence: The mediating role of sexual objectification. Psychology of Violence, 4, 156-169. doi:10.1037/a0033840

Gibbons, F. X., & Buunk, B. P. (1999). Individual differences in social comparison: Development of a scale of social comparison orientation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 129-142. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.76.1.129

Triandis, H. C., & Gelfand, M. J. (1998). Converging measurement of horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 118-128. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.74.1.118