Washington: Men are perceived as whole while women are sexually
objectified and seen as an assemblage of their body parts by
both the genders, according to a new study. Researchers from
University of Nebraska-Lincoln found in a series of experiments
that participants processed images of men and women in very
different ways, providing clues as to why women are often the
targets of sexual objectification. When presented with images of
men, perceivers tended to rely more on “global” cognitive
processing, the mental method in which a person is perceived as
a whole. Meanwhile, images of women were more often the subject
of “local” cognitive processing, or the objectifying perception
of something as an assemblage of its various parts. The study
published in the European Journal of Social Psychology is the
first to link such cognitive processes to objectification
theory, said Sarah Gervais, assistant professor of psychology at
the University and the study’s lead “Local processing underlies
the way we think about obj