Study Links Religion, Conservatism with Web Searches for 'Sex'

CYBERSPACE—The results of a two-year study conducted by psychologists Cara MacInnis and Gordon Hodson of Brock University indicate what previous research also suggested is a facet of American modern culture—that people who live in more religious or conservative states search for sexual content on the internet more frequently than people in other states, implying a correlation or maybe even causation between the two. AVN has reported on the preceding research over the years. The new study, titled “Do American States with More Religious or Conservative Populations Search More for Sexual Content on Google?” which is published in the October 2014 issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, takes a direct look at what the synopsis describes as “a paradoxical private attraction to sexual content on the political and religious right” that belies the “religiosity and conservatism … generally associated with opposition to non-traditional sexual behavior.” As explained by Real Clear Science, MacInnis and Hodson “analyzed Internet use data in 2011 and 2012 with Google Trends, specifically measuring the search volume of the terms ‘sex,’ ‘gay sex,’ ‘porn,’ ‘xxx,’ ‘free porn,’ ‘gay porn,’ and the Google Image search term ‘sex.’ They then examined how the data was associated with state level religiosity and conservatism. An immense 2011 Gallup survey of 350,000 people supplied those values. Religiosity was gauged by the percentage of ‘very religious’ individuals within each state and the percentage of individuals considering religion ‘an important part of their daily lives.’ Conservatism was determined by the proportion of self-identified conservatives.” The synopsis continues, “Across two separate years, and controlling for demographic variables, we observed moderate-to-large positive associations between: (1) greater proportions of state-level religiosity and general web searching for sexual content and (2) greater proportions of state-level conservatism and image-specific searching for sex. “These findings,” it adds, “were interpreted in terms of the paradoxical hypothesis that a greater preponderance of right-leaning ideologies is associated with greater preoccupation with sexual content in private internet activity. Alternative explanations (e.g., that opposition to non-traditional sex in right-leaning states leads liberals to rely on private internet sexual activity) are discussed, as are limitations to inference posed by aggregate data more generally.” Real Clear Science suggests that the alternative explanation that liberals in conservative states are making the searches “exonerates conservatives,” but no one appears to dispute the data.