

Our Brains See Men as Whole and Women as Parts - mikeleeorg
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=our-brains-see-men-as-whole-women-as-parts

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tokenadult
It's an interesting idea. But the European Journal of Social Psychology is
currently beset with a number of articles that have had to be retracted,

[http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/three-
more-r...](http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/three-more-
retractions-for-diederik-stapel/)

so of all the relevant journals, I especially doubt the acumen of its editors
and peer reviewers. Before I would believe a finding like this, I would check
it against the full checklist "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and
Interpretation"

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

by Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, and I would definitely want to
see replication of the result by other researchers, published in better
journals, with lots of critique and refinement of the experimental method
before accepting this finding as a fact about the external world of how most
people's brains work.

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zeroonetwothree
In particular, from Norvig's page:

"As another example, many psychology experiments are run on volunteer college
students. Often an experimenter gets a result from such an experiment and
claims it is valid across all people, but later finds out that the result only
holds for (a) people roughly 20 years old or (b) people with the skills and
dedication necessary to be a college student or (c) the type of people who
like to volunteer for things."

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sp332
I'm not sure why the researchers assume that this is sexual. They even
designed one of the tests with only sexualized body parts in play. The
experiments are about objectification, but there's no experiment here that
could even verify whether it's sexual.

~~~
gph
Yea, from reading the article it seems like the entire test was bent towards a
sexual angle. Perhaps they've already done some more neutral tests and this
one came after those, but it feels like they were leading the results with the
format of the test.

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crazygringo
There's another very plausible explanation:

Womens' clothing and appearance varies much more.

Men don't have the choice of 15 different kinds of clothing tops and bottoms,
whereas women do, plus accessories, much wider variety of hairstyles, makeup,
etc. Plus they tend to put a lot more effort into choosing them.

So in recognizing photos of women, there are a lot more unique "local" details
to help you remember things.

Making the leap to women being "objectified" more seems to be editorializing
this way more than is deserved.

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monicaemiller
Women are shapely. They are easier to dissect into sum of parts. Men, however,
are rather square in form, discounting obesity. This is more a reflection of
how we memorize shapes rather than a commentary of evolutionary
objectification.

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zeroonetwothree
Link to paper:
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.1890/abstrac...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.1890/abstract)

It's gated so I wasn't able to actually read it.

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jinushaun
There's an aura of Victorian-era sexual guilt around what is described by the
research as a natural by-product of evolution.

