Supporting Data for "Dehumanization and Ostracism: Responses to Sexualized Images of Women"

This dataset is for my M.Phil thesis, which is about the impact of sexualization on dehumanizing perception and interaction intentions during social interaction. Ethical approval has been issued by HREC.   

In Study 1, six sexualized female images and six non-sexualized female images were used to examine whether participants would dehumanize and ostracize the sexualized females more than the other targets. Study 1 provided primary evidence that sexualized women tended to suffer more dehumanization, while such dehumanization would then result in more ostracism towards them.

Since sexualization can be categorized into two types (sex-based vs. appearance-based), Study 2 enriched the findings of Study 1 by further exploring how the two types of sexualization influence others’ dehumanizing tendency. Participants viewed three kinds of Instagram profiles (sex-based sexualized, appearance-based sexualized and non-sexualized) and reported their estimations of human nature and human uniqueness traits to the targets. Their interaction intentions were also tested. The results revealed that people perceived the sexualized targets (both sex-based and appearance-based) as less human, and showed less interaction intentions towards them. And sex-based sexualization showed a stronger effect on all the three variables. Since sexualization is a continuum, it is unclear whether the degree of sexualization influences dehumanization and ostracism. Sex-based sexualization consists of both revealing clothing and suggestive posture. Study 3 set up three conditions to manipulate the extent to which the targets were sexualized: non-revealing (low sexualization), revealing (mild sexualization) and sexually revealing (high sexualization). The results showed that participants dehumanized the (sexually) revealing targets more than the non-revealing targets. But the revealing and sexually revealing condition didn’t elicit significant difference.

The data was collected via Qualitrcis in TurkPrime. Participants were from the USA. There are no personal identifiers or confidential information in this dataset. Original datasets (R#) contain the raw data and mostly responses of scales. The organized dataset (S#) can be used for analysis directly.