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You can probably find more information than I did with a Google Scholar search for the effects of porn on adolescents and children - though this is a very hard
by claudiawerner 6y ago
You can probably find more information than I did with a Google Scholar search for the effects of porn on adolescents and children - though this is a very hard thing to "prove beyond dispute" for several reasons - people react to media in very different ways, effects may only be activated by pre-existing patterns of behaviour and attitudes, there is a large influence from religiosity, among other things; and of course, it'd be unethical to expose children to porn in a lab setting. The best you're going to get is controlled suveys and questionnaires, from researchers working at a school, for example. Consider that we know cannabis and alcohol can have a detrimental effect on young people, but we're obviously not able to watch them smoke or drink it in a controlled environment. All that said (and note that the authors of the first paper are probably the foremost scholars of porn effects research in psychology):
"Additionally, there is meta-analytic evidence to indicate that viewing more pornography and viewing extreme pornography is associated with the sexual objectification of women and more aggressive attitudes (Hald et al., 2010)[0]. Some longitudinal findings link sexual aggression and use of violent pornography, for example, one study of 10-15 year olds in the US found that those who intentionally viewed violent X-rated materials were nearly six times more likely than others to report sexually aggressive behaviour (Ybarra et al. 2011)[1]."[2]
The research on effects of porn is chequered and often has methodological problems, replication problems, and unfortunately assumes one kind of mainstream porn (leaving out, say, erotica, fanfiction overwhelmingly written and read by teens, online erotic roleplaying, etc.) - that said, from my own amateur reading around the topic, there is a strong pointer to substantial negative effects which are usually (though not always) mediated, much in the same way alcohol consumption effects are.
[0] Hald, G.M., Malamuth, N.M., & Yuen, C. (2010). Pornography and attitudes supporting violence against women: Revisiting the relationship in non-experimental studies. Aggressive Behavior.36, 14-20. doi: 10.1002/ab.20328
[1] Ybarra, M.L., Mitchell, K.J., Hamburger, M., Diener-West, M. & Leaf, P.J. (2011). X-rated material and perpetration of sexually aggressive behavior among children and adolescents: Is there a link? Aggressive Behavior, 37, 1–18.
[2] Victoria et al. (2016). Identifying the routes by which children view pornography online: implications for future policy-makers seeking to limit viewing report of expert panel for DCMS. Technical Report. Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
- jjgreen 6y agoYour reference [2] is a case of nominative determinism.
- claudiawerner 6y agoThe fact that the quotation I found was cited in a normative report is irrelevant to the research it (and I) am highlighting - the first two citations; my only goal was to provide some information on the topic, which hopefully another commenter here can expand on. Think of [2] as more of a 'cited in ...' citation than a "here's the evidence" citation.
- jjgreen 6y agoNominative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
- claudiawerner 6y agoI don't know how I missed that, even when pointed out. I think I'm much more used to seeing the word "normative" in these discussions than I am "nominative". Thanks for clearing up the confusion.
- Arkhaine_kupo 6y agoI could be wrong here, but isn't there a pretty well established relationship between testosterone and violent/aggressive behaviours? I understand the difficulty of testing this kind of relationships but the casual link might be totally inverse, kids who have too much testosterone also are predisposed to that type of content rather than it being the content that informs the tendencies. Regardless of the real reason thats a ton of material to read, so thanks!
- belorn 6y agoAh, the complex interaction of testosterone. Not only is it inverse, but the cause and effect is also inverse. Aggressive behavior is not predictable by testosterone levels, but the inverse, testosterone levels are predictable by aggressive behavior. For example, male sport teams that win a match has increased testosterone levels afterwards and reduced levels if they loose. Similar, sport spectators mirror this pattern. If for example two people have fisticuffs at a bar and we measured testosterone before and after, the winner would see an increase in testosterone secretion while the looser would have an reduction. And then we come to violent content, and indeed there exist some research on this. The result is a bit more complicated. Only people who are already disposed towards aggressive behavior see an increase in testosterone secretion after watching a violent movie. So what does that mean? There is a theory called the challenge hypothesis. In this theory testosterone acts as a modulator to how much behavior an individual will spend in order to retain status once challenged. If an individual gain status, such when two males compete and one wins and the other losses, testosterone secretion increase in order to encourage more energy use towards defending that possible short term gain in social status until a new social hierarchy has stabilized. The more sudden the gain the more testosterone is secreted, and the more the relationship between testosterone and violent/aggressive behaviours can be observed. (for some interesting reading I can recommend The Trouble With Testosterone by robert sapolsky or one of his lecture on the topic)