Both Genders Stare At Women's Boobs Before Their Faces

New research suggests women and men alike tend to look at female's bodies before their faces.

Researchers tracked the eye movements of 65 college students of both genders as they looked at 30 photos of 10 college-aged women images with different body shapes, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln news release reported.

The team found both males and females' eyes scanned over the woman's breasts and other sexual organs before moving up to the face.

The researchers hope this discovery will call attention to the objectification of women's bodies, and could help minimize its harmful effects.

While there was little difference between male and female eye movements when looking at a women's body, only men tended to perceive curvier women in a more positive light than those with less curves.

Study co-leader Sarah Gervais was surprised that women appeared to objectify other women so often.

"We do have a slightly different pattern for men than women, but when we looked at their overall dwell times - how long they focused on each body part - we find the exact same effects for both groups," she said. "Women, we think, do it often for social comparison purposes."

In some cases women moved their eyes to the females face quicker than males.

When the male participants were asked to focus only on the personality of the woman in the image, they were still more likely to have a positive perception of her is she had an hourglass figure.

"[Objectification] can undermine [women's] work performance. It can cause them to self-silence and it's related to increased perceptions of sexual harassment," Gervais said. "If you think about all of the negative consequences, figuring out what's triggering all of those consequences, that's the first step toward stopping it from happening."

The researchers believe the behavior could be changed through self-awareness.

"By characterizing the manner in which people fixate on the body when engaging in objectifying behavior, it also becomes possible to determine methods of reducing this behavior. That's what the personality manipulation part of the study did - that's a huge positive," another study leader Michael Dodd said. "It's not as though looking at the body of someone has to be, or is, a default behavior. It just may be the case that cognitive control is required to engage in more appropriate, and less damaging, visual behavior."