While the outcome of this research saddens me, I can't say I'm the least bit surprised by it. The media constantly creates a divide between those who are intended to be viewed as sexual objects and those intended to be acknowledged for their brains and knowledge. Movies and television consistently depict characters who are an extreem version of reality, either heavily sexualized or brainy (and therefore entirely de-sexualized).

Water is wet, bears shit in the woods, the pope is catholic, etc., etc.

I think you are implying this is common sense. It isn't.

Do you really think it is obvious that the male brain wouldn't even recognize sexy women as human? When you see people, the mFPC is activated, UNLESS you are a man and it is a sexy woman. I don't know about you, but I like to think people would recognize a human as, well, human nuerologically.

Maybe if I put this differently for you the findings would seem less obvious. You see a desk, a table, a chair, a sexually dressed women and another woman. Which wouls you predict would involve the same brain areas?

You would totally guess the women together, and then the objects together and you know it. Yet, you would be wrong.

Take another instance. We have found that merely focusing on a woman's appearance makes people rate her as less moral. Really? You think that is common sense? On what common sense notion would you make that prediction?

Take another instance: Men see a sexy woman and rate her as less competent. Common sense would perhaps tell you the opposite; that a man would want to perceive this sexy woman as positively as possible. Let's take this one step further. Do men perceive other women as incompetent after viewing these sexy woman? Why would they when they are a separate woman. People know the difference between the two women right?

Well, yes, but they still rate the other woman (not sexually dressed) as less competent. This is common sense? Riiight. Come join my research lab Nostradamus and see how many studies you predict right.

Women who are sexy are more associated with animal words at such basic level that it impacts people's reaction times? This is not common sense.

There is a thing called hindsight bias; maybe you should study it. There is also a thing called the bias blind spot. YOu should study that too.

I love it how scientific research is either a) so obvious that everyone surely knew the result before some boffins studied it or b) so inconsistent with my personal experience that it must be completely wrong and the product of some boffins chasing grant money. Often this is used to describe the same research, sometimes by the same people.

It's a pity that the only people who know who to do science are too busy trolling blogs. Imagine if we could capture their prophetic potential in our research labs! Then, once we have all the taxi drivers in office, we will live in utopia.

I am off to post hindsight bias and blind spot bias on all the science troll pages i can find.

Ed.

Yeah, you basically summed up how a lot of people respond to studies like this. It is either (a) common sense or (b) not true, because well, they can think of one exception so that disproves the entire study. This is created not only by those 2 biases, but also because people are pretty much shit at knowing the actual causes of their behaviors/attitudes.

Women are seen as sex object. Whether a man thinks she is hot or not he still sees her as a sex object because by what she is wearing. Now days women are in music videos including country videos with hardly anything on while men stand looking at their bodies. Rarely the camera is focused on their face its always about the legs, the boobs, the butt. It disgusts me seeing women rolling around in bed sheets making out with guys. Women wonder why men think they are sex objects, yet young girls are running around dangling over guys all over the video. This makes other women who actually care and respect themselves look like bimbos who only want sex. Society wonders why the rape is rising men think women always want sex. Which is not true. WOMEN RESPECT YOURSELVES BEFORE YOU DEMAND RESPECT!!!

especially after reading about all the research done by others. It's amazing how clearly the dots are connected after others draw it! :)) What I don't get, is how can people then claim that porn isn't harmful? If merely looking at a barely-dressed woman makes the men then think less of the fully-dressed female researcher, how would the images of porn change the male perception of non-porn women? But I forgot, this study was science, porn is free speech. :\

I wonder what changes are occurring in the last 15 years to the brains of men. With the rise of Internet porn use, especially by kids, it must be having an effect. especially considering that much of the new porn is violent, degrading, and not at all like reality.

Ahh, I miss the good old days of the pizza-delivery guy doing the housewife all by himself, in the vagina, nothing kinky or painful.

What is this 24/7 porn doing to our kids brains??

When I was a kid ( 1960´s ) I thought there were 2 kinds of women: 1-Those you could marry and don´t have sex with. and 2-Those you could only have sex with, either paying them or not.Wrong ! Really wrong ! What happens nowadays ? In my country Costa Rica most of young women think that in order to be attractive to young men they have to wear less and less clothes or show their bodies as much as they can. They don´t try to demonstrate they are capable and intelligent, that their brains are full of good things for themselfs and for men. So , in this respect, many school girls want to be models, show their bodies and make a lot of money. In my opinion this is a form of prostitution. All this makes men to look first at their boobs and if possible at their camel toe, and lastly at the face, eyes ,personality, etc. the solution is , obviuosly, in the hands of all the women.

A few years ago, somebody organized a survey, first asking women and then asking men. The question was: Which part of the female body do men look at first ? Women answered things like: the boobs, the hips, the butt, mainly sexually attractive parts. Now, when the same question was answered by men, the answers were: the eyes, the face, the lips. If they didn´t lie, I must conclude that: 1-Women think they must show off those parts, to be attractive. 2-Women don´t know the real behavior and interests of men towards women.3-Women must change their minds by trying to induce men not to look at them as sex objects, but as nice and warm human beings, anyway they make 50% of the world population, so their contribution has to be grreat and important, instead of thinking about themselfs as sex objects.

Actually, the general consensus of pornography research is that watching violent pornography is correlated with having explicit misogynistic or otherwise dehumanizing views of women while watching non-violent pornography is not. As seems to be the case with men who watch non-violent pornography, non-sexist people may objectify sexy women in photos and videos for a host of reasons unrelated to how they actually, consciously feel about women in general.

Some commenters seem to have confused implicit attitudes with private attitudes, and the two are *completely* unrelated. I wish that the author had clarified that implicit attitudes are intuitive, automatic and subconscious - we are *unaware* that we have them (i.e. when we associate sexily dressed women more so with animals). On the other hand, we are consciously aware of our private attitudes, just may not share them with others (i.e. socially inappropriate opinions). Explicit attitudes are the public or private responses that we intentionally edit and consciously form. These conscious, explicit attitudes usually dictate our behavior.

Although the research cited in this article is alarming, the author oversimplifies the complexities of a person's implicit and explicit attitudes and seems to suggest that implicit associations dictate people’s explicit attitudes and behavior more than they actually do. Our conscious, explicit attitudes usually override our unconscious, sometimes disturbing, implicit attitudes (i.e. sexy women are less human), except in situations where we make quick, automatic decisions or judgments. In fact, implicit and explicit attitudes are not highly correlated in research at all.

For example…

Studies on race relations show the vast majority of explicitly non-racist participants, regardless of their own race, are implicitly racist when making rapid judgments. These participants were shocked at the results of the experiment since they were not *consciously* aware that they were expressing a racial bias. The findings of these studies indicate that in split-second, superficial decisions we rely on our implicit attitudes, but in every other situation, we rely on our explicit attitudes.

I am not suggesting that implicit associations do not influence behavior or that they are not important; I am merely suggesting that we are more conscious of our attitudes in most everyday interactions than this author suggests, and that we are constantly regulating our thoughts, attitudes and behaviors. It would have been much more alarming to me if the fMRI scans of non-sexist males matched those of highly sexist males, because such brain activity would have been inconsistent with the non-sexist participants’ conscious attitudes. As it stands, the fMRI scans of non-sexist and highly sexist males are disturbing, but nonetheless reflective of their explicit cognitive thought processes.

This research is discouraging and upsetting, but such implicit associations may not necessarily paint as "bleak" a picture for women as the author suggests. The author says himself that this research is mostly alarming for women and to some extent, men, who are evaluated solely on their appearance (a largely automatic, intuitive - read, implicit - judgment). Since most of us are not supermodels and since we rely mostly upon our conscious, explicit thought processes when we actually take the time to interact with others and vice versa, we are probably not as damned or influenced by implicit attitudes and associations as this author seems to suggest.

In other words, our automatic implicit associations are regulated by more cognitively resonant conscious thought processes, so they are not as lasting or salient as suggested by this article. I would be very interested to see how the participants rated their explicit attitudes (more towards sexist or non-sexist) at different time intervals after being primed to express certaian implicit attitudes...

I eagerly await the followup, where these researchers prove that the sun rises in the east.

I find it interesting that other commenters just assumed that this is a problem caused by the portrayal of women in the media or the availability of Internet porn. I've read nothing here to make me leap to the conclusion that this somehow "getting worse" or tied to any particular culture.

Are there any theories to help answer why the male mind have evolved to work this way?

Well, the fMRI study (not the others) only found the effects for males that also scored high in sexism. I would think sexism is probably learned (or at least mostly learned). But, some of the studies also didn't even have sexualized images, and similar effects emerged, and the effects in a lot of the studies also had female participants that also did this other women.

But, I mean, it is probably like anything. It is both sort of innate and learned, I would guess.

I'm not a big evolutionary psych buff, so (and?) I can't really think of a straightforward way this would apply. But, it probably isn't a coincidence that you rarely see sexualized pregnant women. This would presumably be the time the male would want to protect the woman the msot, and perceving them as warm and moral and competent probably has a lot of advantages towards wanting to protect them.

Even in long term/marriage contexts for men, you don't see the same time of sexualization usually. If you do, it is probably more wholesome (the beauty is emphasized, not the raw sexuality) So, it seems like there would be something to that.

But, I am talking out my ass, as I don't know how an evolutionary psych person would explain this.

(I tend to be more of a social learning/culture proponent myself)

This could be why women are objectified/humiliated in pornography. Their degradation is less humane by the viewer perhaps? I'm doubtful people would actually enjoy watching erotic asphyxiation or someone being urinated on. The woman's sexiness makes her inhuman I guess.

The great amoral corporate influence reduces even the most beautiful of human sentiments,love of the female form, for crass exploitation, packaging, sale, Everyone else knows this. Every prostitute realizes this, even the virgin bride, all wrapped in her expensive gown, all packaged up for what is to come next. China does not do this! India still respects some human beauty, some human dignity. Old Europe stands in awe.
Womanhood, An old, British, even European tradition, based on entirely different sentiments, in two hundred years, in America, has grown to lewd, sexual, corporate exploitation, sad degradation, of the female form to serve Corporatist, Capitalist,and their profits. As the last, the greatest, Caucasian empire the world will ever know, flounders, perverts its cultural values, dilutes them in the American 'Melting Pot', we can hardly look away, like children staring in madness as their parents are slayed before them. Dumbstruck, frozen, and drugged on sweet pot-smoke from the great propaganda machine of the corporatists. Hollywood has stolen our bride.