Evidence for an Association between Men’s Spontaneous Objectifying Gazing Behavior and their Endorsement of Objectifying Attitudes toward Women

Domination and Objectification: Men’s Motivation for Dominance Over Women Affects Their Tendency to Sexually Objectify Women

“…The descriptive statistics for the four sexual objectification outcome variables were as follows: objectifying avatar ( M = 2.08, SD = 1.56), objectifying task preference ( M = 4.82, SD = 2.27), engagement in objectification ( M = .14, SD = .05), and explicit objectification ( M = 3.37, SD = 0.87). The three behavioral measures of sexual objectification positively correlated with the explicit, self-reported measure (whose construct validity was established in previous research, e.g., Bareket, Kahalon, et al, 2018; Bareket, Shnabel, et al, 2018), r s = .21–.42, p s < .03. This indicates that these behavioral measures (two of them developed for the purpose of this study and used here for the first time) tapped into the construct they were supposed to measure.…”

“…Previous researchers reported obtaining good internal consistencies (α = .88 in an Israeli student sample; Bareket, Shnabel, et al, 2018; α = .82 in an Israeli convenience sample; Bareket, Kahalon, et al, 2018; α = .80 in a U.S. MTurk sample; and α = .78 in a German student sample; Kahalon et al, 2019) and test-retest reliability ( r = .88; Curran, 2004) for scores on this questionnaire. The scale’s positive correlations with objectifying gazing behavior provide evidence for predictive validity (Bareket, Shnabel, et al, 2018). Positive correlations with hostile and benevolent sexism, endorsement of sexual double standards, and polarized perceptions of women’s sexuality (i.e., the madonna-whore dichotomy; Bareket, Kahalon, et al, 2018) provide evidence for convergent validity.…”

“…The 19 items that we selected captured diverse objectification-related attitudes such as the belief that the objectification of the other gender is natural and entertaining, internalized sexual objectification, commenting and flirting with attractive women/men, and crudeness toward unattractive women/men. This shortened version for men was translated and successfully used in previous research among Israeli participants (Bareket, Kahalon, Shnabel, & Glick, 2018; Bareket, Shnabel, Abeles, Gervais, & Yuval-Greenberg, 2018). The version for women was translated by the authors for the purpose of this research.…”

“…The percentage of time that participants devoted to looking at and ranking the photographs of women’s bodies in swimsuits out of the total amount of time they spent on the photograph-ranking task served as an additional behavioral measure of sexual objectification (we refer to this measure as Engagement in Objectification). Since the target photographs included only the bodies (but not the faces) of women in swimsuits, this measure is similar to the behavioral measure of objectification that is used in eye tracking research (e.g., Bareket, Shnabel, et al, 2018), in which researchers assess men’s sexually objectifying gaze as the amount of time they devote to the visual inspection of women’s bodies.…”

“…Finally, we measured participants’ sexual objectification of women. Because women’s sexual objectification manifests in many ways (e.g., the endorsement of objectifying attitudes vs. the enactment of an objectifying gaze; Bareket, Shnabel, et al, 2018), we aimed to capture this multifaceted construct by using diverse measures (e.g., referring specifically to the objectification of the partner vs. to women in general; referring to attitudes toward objectification vs. actual gazing behavior). Thus, besides the explicit, self-report measure that we used in Study 1, we used three implicit behavioral measures of sexual objectification (specified in the Method section).…”