Power, Ethnic Origin, and Sexual Objectification

In this study, we investigated the effects of primed power onsexual objectification of Caucasian and Asian men and women. As in previous studies,sexual objectification was assessed using an inversion paradigm with face–body compoundstimuli. Previous work has shown that participants primed to power do not show thetypical drop in recognition performance for inverted face–body compound stimuli,suggesting that they process these stimuli in terms of their individual features, in amanner akin to objects, and quite different from the way in which faces and bodies arenormally processed (i.e., configurally). Caucasian male and female participants wereprimed to high or neutral-power before engaging in an old/new recognition task involvingsexualized face–body compound images of Caucasian and Asian men and women. Participantsprimed to high-power showed a decreased inversion effect for Caucasian models of theopposite gender, but not for Asian models. Thus, power exerts different effects on thisspecific type of social perception, depending on the ethnic origin of the target. Wediscuss our results in the context of the extant literature on power and with referenceto media stereotyping of Caucasians and Asians