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"
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.
Re:Our Brains See Men as Whole and Women as Parts
by zeroonetwothree on Wednesday July 25, 2012 @05:11PM
(#4293070)
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."
Re:Our Brains See Men as Whole and Women as Parts
by stfu on Friday July 27, 2012 @03:01PM
(#4303049)
I would definitely want to see replication of the result by other researchers, published in better journals
Is there any chance that this is going to happen? From my experience of reading (more social science) oriented journals it seems super rare that someone is actually interested in replicating someone else's results.
Re:Our Brains See Men as Whole and Women as Parts
by sp332 on Wednesday July 25, 2012 @04:48PM
(#4292947)
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.
Re:Our Brains See Men as Whole and Women as Parts
by gph on Wednesday July 25, 2012 @05:00PM
(#4293015)
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.
Re:Our Brains See Men as Whole and Women as Parts
by crazygringo on Wednesday July 25, 2012 @05:24PM
(#4293143)
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.
Re:Our Brains See Men as Whole and Women as Parts
by monicaemiller on Wednesday July 25, 2012 @05:53PM
(#4293287)
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.
http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/three-more-r...
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.
"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."
Is there any chance that this is going to happen? From my experience of reading (more social science) oriented journals it seems super rare that someone is actually interested in replicating someone else's results.
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.
It's gated so I wasn't able to actually read it.