Self-identification as a pornography addict: examining the roles of pornography use, religiousness, and moral incongruence

Abstract

At present, the scientific community has not reached a consensus regarding whether or not people may be become addicted to or compulsive in use of pornography. Even so, a substantial number of people report feeling that their use of pornography is dysregulated or out of control. Whereas prior works considered self-reported feelings of addiction via indirect scales or dimensional measures, the present work examined what might lead someone to specifically identify as a pornography addict. Consistent with prior research, pre-registered hypotheses predicted that religiousness, moral disapproval, and average daily pornography use would emerge as consistent predictors of self-identification as a pornography addict. Four samples, involving adult pornography users (Sample 1, N = 829, M_age = 33.3; SD = 9.4; Sample 2, N = 424, M_age = 33.6; SD = 9.1; Sample 4, N = 736, M_age = 48.0; SD = 15.8) and undergraduates (Sample 3, N = 231, M_age = 19.3; SD = 1.8), were collected. Across all three samples, male gender, moral incongruence, and average daily pornography use consistently emerged as predictors of self-identification as a pornography addict. In contrast to prior literature indicating that moral incongruence and religiousness are the best predictors of self-reported feelings of addiction (measured dimensionally), results from all four samples indicated that male gender and average daily pornography use were the most strongly associated with self-identification as a pornography addict, although moral incongruence consistently emerged as a robust and unique predictors of such self-identification.

Keywords:

• Pornography
• addiction
• religion
• morality
• shame

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of a Pilot Grant of the National Center for Responsible Gaming awarded to the first author of this manuscript in funding Sample 2 of this work.

Notes

1 Of note, prior literature has often been varied in how it frames or describes individuals’ self-reports of problems associated with IPU. Prior works by the present author have variously used the terms “perceived addiction to internet pornography” and “pornography problems due to moral incongruence” (Grubbs, Perry, Wilt, & Reid, 2018; Grubbs, Volk, Exline, & Pargament, 2015). Other literature has similarly used the “self-perceived pornography addiction” (Duffy, Dawson, & das Nair, 2016). Still other literature has used terms such as “problematic pornography use” or “problematic pornography viewing” (Borgogna, McDermott, Browning, Beach, & Aita, 2018; Kor et al., 2014) For the present work, we have chosen to use the term “self-reported feelings of addiction,” by which we mean self-reported feelings of compulsivity or loss of control. Where relevant, we have noted in citations what measure was used to assess such feelings.

2 Due to the ordinal nature of some of our data (e.g., pornography use frequency) and the extreme skew of some variables (e.g., average daily use of pornography), we also conducted these exploratory analyses using non-parametric tests (Mann-Whitney’s test and Spearman’s Rho). In all cases, results did not meaningfully differ in terms of sign, relative size, or significance. As such, for the sake of conciseness and brevity, we have omitted these non-parametric tests from our final results.