Research has shown that sexualized people are perceived as possessing fewer traits of a human being. Most scholars have argued that these effects are driven by revealing clothing, with targets wearing swimsuits or lingerie being perceived as possessing less mind and less humanness in comparison with nonsexualized targets. However, revealing clothing in these studies was often confounded with other sexualizing factors, such as posture suggestiveness, and, so, the aspects which lead people to perceive women in object-like ways remain unclear. This article begins to fill this gap by examining the role of two key sexualizing factors, namely revealing clothing and posture suggestiveness, on objectification-related traits. After exposure to a picture of a woman, 223 participants were asked to indicate the extent to which this woman possessed warmth, competence, and morality. For competence and warmth, we found an interaction between revealing clothing and posture suggestiveness: Posture suggestiveness caused less attribution of warmth and competence to women wearing revealing clothing, but not for women wearing less revealing clothing. For morality, we found that women in suggestive (vs. nonsuggestive) postures were perceived as possessing less morality, regardless of the type of clothing. The implications of these findings for the field are discussed.

People are exposed to sexualized images of men and women on a daily basis. This sexualization in mass media is manifested through men and women often depicted in various states of undress and in sexually connoted postures (Hatton & Trautner, 2011) across various entertainment platforms (e.g., video clips, magazines, TV shows, video games) and through advertisements (Ward, 2016). To illustrate this, Hatton and Trautner (2011) analyzed the content of Rolling Stone magazine covers across four decades; they found that the frequency and intensity of the sexualization of men and women increased over the decades. These authors also found that women are nowadays still more frequently and more intensively sexualized than men, with women often presented as hyper-sexualized (through, e.g., a combination of nudity and sexually connoted postures), whereas men are not. Sexualization is, thus, multifaceted (i.e., revealing clothing, suggestive postures, self-touching, etc.), but these different facets are not necessarily equal or dehumanizing in the same ways. It therefore matters to uncover the different ways in which media sexualization is manifested and how these different ways affect how we perceive others. The present article begins to fill this gap by examining whether revealing clothing, posture suggestiveness, or both contribute to sexualization-related dehumanized perceptions.

Given the prevalence of sexualized images in the media (Hatton & Trautner, 2011), and their negative effects on women’s well-being (e.g., increased body dissatisfaction: Krawczyk & Thompson, 2015; negative mood, weight-related appearance anxiety: Harper & Tiggemann, 2008; self-objectification: Aubrey, 2006; see Groesz, Levine, & Murnen, 2002, for a meta-analytic review), a growing body of research has started to examine the effect of sexualization on the way people perceive others. Based on Objectification Theory, which posits that sexualization in the media is a critical vehicle of the objectification of women in Western cultures (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997), researchers started to investigate whether sexualization leads people to see and appraise them in “object-like” ways. Recently, it has been shown that people visually process sexualized bodies very differently from nonsexualized bodies and similarly to objects: People process nonsexualized bodies configurally, globally whereas they rely on a more local, piecemeal processing when viewing images of sexualized bodies and ordinary objects, and this cognitive objectification occurs at both neural (e.g., Bernard, Content, Deltenre, & Colin, 2018; Bernard, Hanoteau et al., 2018; Bernard, Rizzo et al., 2018) and behavioral levels (Bernard, Gervais, Allen, Campomizzi, & Klein, 2015; Bernard, Gervais, Allen, Campomizzi, & Klein, 2012; Bernard, Gervais, Allen, Delmée, & Klein, 2015; Civile & Obhi, 2016). In accordance with feminist scholars who posited that objectification is related to a reduction of others to their sexual body parts (e.g., Bartky, 1990), this line of research shows that sexualized bodies are cognitively reduced to their parts akin to objects (for a review, see Bernard, Gervais, & Klein, 2018).

Moreover, when people form impressions about others, they are also more likely to perceive sexualized targets in “object-like” ways, that is, to attribute fewer traits of a human being and more traits of an object to sexualized people than to their nonsexualized counterparts (for reviews, see Heflick & Goldenberg, 2014; Ward, 2016). In these studies, sexualization is manipulated through the amount of skin versus clothing that is visible, with sexualized targets associated with clothing that reveals a large amount of skin (e.g., swimsuit, underwear), and nonsexualized targets wearing less revealing clothing (e.g., jeans and T-shirt). A growing body of research showed that people perceived sexualized women as possessing less mind (Loughnan et al., 2010), fewer uniquely human characteristics (Vaes, Paladino, & Puvia, 2011), and less agency (Cikara, Eberhardt, & Fiske, 2011) in comparison with nonsexualized women. This subtle dehumanization predicts, in turn, the way in which people evaluate the responsibility of the perpetrator versus victim of sexual or nonsexual aggression (Bernard, Loughnan, Godart, Marchal, & Klein, 2015; Loughnan, Pina, Vasquez, & Puvia, 2013; Pacilliet al., 2017).

One may think that the latter body of research delivers a clear message: Sexualization, manipulated through revealing clothing, causes people to attribute fewer traits of a human being and more traits of an object to women. However, we suggest that this conclusion is unwarranted. It indeed appears that sexualization often has very different meanings depending on the researcher: Sexualized targets not only wear more revealing clothing in comparison with nonsexualized targets, they are often associated with greater body-to-face ratio (e.g., Bernard, Loughnan et al., 2015; Loughnan et al., 2010; Wollast, Puvia, Bernard, Tevichapong, & Klein, 2018), and more posture suggestiveness (e.g., Bernard, Content et al., 2018; Civile & Obhi, 2016; Loughnan et al., 2013) in the same investigations. The use of sexualization as an umbrella term in objectification research, therefore, makes questions of which aspects of sexualization cause people to be perceived in more object-like ways and in less human-like ways less clear. In this article, we will examine the effects of two core dimensions of target sexualization, namely revealing clothing and posture suggestiveness, and we will investigate their effects on “object-like” dehumanized perceptions.

Postural suggestiveness relates to an open body language that is sexually connoted. Generally speaking, we know that postural openness modulates the way people form impressions about others (e.g., Burgoon, 1991), with recent studies indicating that higher posture suggestiveness contributes to women being perceived as more sexually objectified. For example, Fasoli, Durante, Mari, Zogmaister, and Volpato (2018) presented to participants three types of images in line with Hatton and Trautner’s (2011) sexualization coding scheme: Women wearing nonrevealing clothing with neutral poses (condition nonrevealing); women wearing revealing clothing with neutral poses (condition revealing); women wearing revealing clothing with sexual poses (condition sexualized revealing). Participants were asked to indicate the extent to which the women depicted were portrayed as a sexual object. Fasoli et al. (2018) found that the women in the sexualized revealing condition were perceived more as sexual objects in comparison with the women in the revealing condition, followed by the women in the nonrevealing condition, thereby suggesting that people perceive women as being sexual objects to a greater extent when targets are both wearing revealing clothing and displaying suggestive postures. In a related manner, another recent study manipulated revealing clothing and posture suggestiveness while assessing the neural correlates of the early visual processing of sexualized people (Bernard, Hanoteau, et al., 2018). Specifically, the authors manipulated revealing clothing and posture suggestiveness and examined whether revealing clothing, posture suggestiveness, or both cause bodies to be processed less configurally and more analytically, that is, similarly to the way most objects are perceived (Maurer, Le Grand, & Mondloch, 2002). These authors found that bodies displaying nonsuggestive postures were processed configurally regardless of the clothing type, whereas bodies with suggestive postures (regardless of the clothing type) were processed in piecemeal ways akin to ordinary objects (for similar findings, see also Bernard, Content et al., 2018; Bernard, Rizzo et al., 2018). In sum, these recent studies suggest that posture suggestiveness contributes to the perception of women as sexual objects and to visually process them as such. These studies, however, remain silent relative to the downstream consequences of revealing clothing versus posture suggestiveness on the way we form impressions about others. This article examines which specific dehumanizing characteristics are associated with clothing sexualization and which characteristics are associated with posture sexualization and whether combining clothing and posture sexualization causes increased dehumanization of women.

In this article, we will examine whether revealing clothing, posture suggestiveness, or both cause women to be perceived in object-like ways, that is, as possessing fewer traits of a human being and more traits of an object. To do so, we assessed the extent to which participants perceived a woman as possessing warmth, competence, and morality. These dimensions pertaining to the Stereotype Content Model (SCM; Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002) are indeed closely related to whether people are perceived as being human- versus object-like. For instance, people who are both low in warmth and in competence are dehumanized at a neural level (Harris & Fiske, 2006) and are also perceived as lacking in internal mental states (Harris & Fiske, 2007). In addition, research has shown that the warmth dimension includes two components: warmth (e.g., likability, kindness) and morality (e.g., trustworthiness, honesty) (Leach, Ellemers, & Barreto, 2007). Morality, just like warmth, also predicts attribution of humanness (Haslam, 2006). Furthermore, studies have considered decreased perception of competence (e.g., intelligent, capable) of sexualized targets as indicators of depersonalization (Loughnan et al., 2010) and dehumanization (Wollast et al., 2018). Importantly, it has been shown that appearance-focused participants tend to attribute less warmth, less competence, and less morality to female targets than personality-focused participants (Heflick, Goldenberg, Cooper, & Puvia, 2011), suggesting that people attribute fewer traits of a human being to women when focusing on their physical appearance rather than on their personality.

We examined two concurrent hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that revealing clothing and posture suggestiveness will be sufficient to trigger object-like attributions: Participants will attribute less warmth, less competence, and less morality to women wearing revealing clothing in comparison with women wearing less revealing clothing (H1a); and they will attribute less warmth, less competence, and less morality to the women displaying suggestive postures in comparison with the women displaying nonsuggestive postures (H1b). The second hypothesis (H2) is that women will be perceived in object-like ways only when depicted as hyper-sexualized (i.e., through a combination of revealing clothing and suggestive posture). That is, people will attribute less warmth, less competence, and less morality to the woman in revealing clothing and suggestive posture in comparison with the other targets.

Method Pretest To assess the role of revealing clothing and posture suggestiveness on the attribution of warmth, competence, and morality, we have created new stimuli, that is, a woman depicted in revealing versus nonrevealing clothing and displaying suggestive versus nonsuggestive postures. Toward that end, we bought pictures of a female model wearing underwear and displaying a series of different body postures from an image bank website. We selected 12 postures and conducted a pretest to identify which postures were rated as being the more suggestive versus nonsuggestive. Twenty-two participants (M age = 24.82; 12 men) were asked to indicate the extent to which each of the 12 postures was sexually suggestive on a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 = not at all to 7 = very much. We selected the posture having the lowest versus highest rating in posture suggestiveness. A repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) with posture suggestiveness (nonsuggestive, suggestive) and participant gender (male, female) revealed a main effect of posture suggestiveness, F(1, 20) = 87.13, p < .001, η p 2 = .81, with the suggestive posture being rated as more suggestive (M = 4.91, SD = 1.57) than the nonsuggestive posture (M = 1.73, SD = 1.12). Neither the main effect of participant gender, F(1, 20) = 1.06, p = .32, η p 2 = .05, nor the interaction between posture suggestiveness and target gender, F(1, 20) = .10, p = .76, η p 2 < .01, reached significance. To create the less revealing clothing versions of the targets, we used an image editing software to cut black clothes from a picture we took ourselves. We placed these black clothes on the two preselected pictures. By doing so, all pictures depicted the same woman; the pictures differed only as a function of posture suggestiveness and clothing. We pixelated the target’s face to minimize face processing. The pictures are presented in Figure 1. Download Open in new tab Download in PowerPoint Participants and Procedure Two hundred twenty-three U.K. participants fully completed an online survey lasting 2 to 3 min and received a monetary compensation of £0.20 ($.30; hourly wage = £6; $9). We posted the survey link on Prolific website. The survey was not visible to participants who took part in the pretest. The sample size was calculated based on Cohen’s d, found in similar studies. Specifically, studies measuring the effect of appearance-focus on perception of warmth, competence, and morality found moderate interaction effects (e.g., Heflick et al., 2011). We then calculated the sample size to detect a moderate interaction effect (d = .5) with a power of .95, which translated into a sample size of 210. From the sample of 223 participants, we excluded five participants (four participants reported that the picture of the woman did not appear at all and at the beginning of the survey and one participant reported to not being fluent in English). The final sample included 218 U.K. participants (M age = 27.50; SD age = 4.81; 136 women). Participants read the following instructions: “On the next page, a picture of a woman will appear for 15 sec. Look carefully at this woman. You will be asked to make a series of judgments about this person; so, from the picture, try to get an idea of what she is like.” Participants were then assigned to one of the four conditions of the study. On the following pages, participants filled a questionnaire assessing their perceptions of this woman. Participants were asked to indicate the extent to which they think different traits were representative of the woman seen in the picture. Based on Heflick et al. (2011), who used two items to assess warmth, competence, and morality, we used two items to assess the dimensions of competence (intelligent, capable), warmth (kind, friendly), and morality (sincere, trustworthy). Internal consistency was acceptable/good for each variable (α competence = .77; α warmth = .86; α morality = .82). Next, the participants read the following instructions: “On the next page, you will see the same woman you already saw. You will be asked to make a second and last series of judgments about this person.” Participants were asked to indicate the extent to which the target wears clothes that reveal her body; displays a sexually suggestive body posture; is depicted in a sexualized way on a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 = not at all to 7 = very much. Finally, the questionnaire ended after a series of demographic questions. We agree to share anonymized data files from this research with other qualified professionals on request to confirm the conclusions of the research.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the National Fund for Scientific Research (FRS-FNRS, Belgium).