Self-reported addiction to pornography in a nationally representative sample: The roles of use habits, religiousness, and moral incongruence

Abstract

Background and aims Despite controversies regarding its existence as a legitimate mental health condition, self-reports of pornography addiction seem to occur regularly. In the United States, prior works using various sampling techniques, such as undergraduate samples and online convenience samples, have consistently demonstrated that some pornography users report feeling dysregulated or out of control in their use. Even so, there has been very little work in US nationally representative samples to examine self-reported pornography addiction. Methods This study sought to examine self-reported pornography addiction in a US nationally representative sample of adult Internet users (N = 2,075). Results The results indicated that most participants had viewed pornography within their lifetimes (n = 1,461), with just over half reporting some use in the past year (n = 1,056). Moreover, roughly 11% of men and 3% of women reported some agreement with the statement “I am addicted to pornography.” Across all participants, such feelings were most strongly associated with male gender, younger age, greater religiousness, greater moral incongruence regarding pornography use, and greater use of pornography. Discussion and conclusion Collectively, these findings are consistent with prior works that have noted that self-reported pornography addiction is a complex phenomenon that is predicted by both objective behavior and subjective moral evaluations of that behavior.