Field Notes

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A Meta-Analysis of Pornography Consumption and Actual Acts of Sexual Aggression in General Population Studies

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Paul Wright, Robert Tokunaga, and Ashley Kraus published this meta-analysis in the Journal of Communication in 2016 (online December 2015). It is the affirmative side of the pornography-aggression dispute and the source most often cited for the claim that consumption predicts aggression.

What it did

The authors note that earlier meta-analyses had established effects on aggressive attitudes in experiments, and set out to test the question those studies had not: whether consumption correlates with committing actual acts of sexual aggression. They analysed 22 studies from seven countries.

What it found

Consumption was associated with sexual aggression both in the United States and internationally. The association held for verbal and physical sexual aggression, and was stronger for verbal than for physical.

How to read it

Two scope limits matter for this wiki. The studies are general-population, which in practice means predominantly adult samples, so the finding does not transfer to adolescents without argument. And the design is correlational: an association between consumption and aggression is consistent with consumption raising risk, with aggression-prone people selecting the content, and with a common cause driving both. The meta-analysis establishes the association, not its direction.

Ferguson and Hartley pornography aggression meta-analysis reaches a substantially different conclusion on an overlapping literature, and Does pornography use cause adolescent sexual aggression holds the two together.

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