Matthew Hutson describes the work of psychologist Kurt Gray, whose research into how people objectify each other has yielded intriguing findings:
In one experiment, subjects saw a photograph and a short description of a man or a woman. The photo showed either just the head or also the shirtless torso. When presented shirtless, targets were seen as having less competence. This is just what you might expect from research on objectification: we’re easily induced to see others as mere objects, pieces of meat without thoughts of their own. But it wasn’t that simple. Shirtless targets weren’t seen as devoid of all thought. They were actually seen as being more capable of emotions and sensations than their less exposed selves. They didn’t have less mental life but a different mental life. Objectification is apparently a misnomer.
To explore the issue further, the researchers turned to the book XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits:
The photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders had shot 30 stars, first fully clothed, then naked, in the same position and with the same expression. The researchers used these images in a series of experiments and … [i]t turned out that naked porn stars are also seen as having less competence but more sensitivity than their clothed selves. And when one actress was shown in an especially sexual pose, the trend only increased, presumably due to greater focus on her body and its pleasures. True objectification, as traditionally conceived of, just did not happen. …
What emerged was that we see the capacity for feelings, whether pleasure or pain or happiness or anger, as distinct from the capacity for intellectual thought and planning. Namely, that we treat those we objectify as less intelligent, yet simultaneously we endow them with a greater ability to feel things. … In most cases, thinking of a person as a body does not lead to objectification in a literal sense, in which the person becomes an object. Rather, he’s dehumanised — he becomes a sensitive beast.
The Dish 