PORNOGRAPHY: RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EROTICA AND BEHAVIOR
Jaffe and others conducted a laboratory experiment in which sexually aroused subjects were required to deliver electrical shocks to an experimental confederate. They found that under these conditions, aroused subjects, both males and females, delivered more intense shocks than nonaroused subjects. Jaffe has supplied as yet unpublished data on a similar experiment in which subjects were allowed to choose whether or not to deliver shocks. Under these conditions, Jaffe found that “when the sexually aroused person has the option of performing positive, prosocial responses or negative aggressive ones, he will, probably, act less aggressively and more positively than will the non-aroused individual. It is suggested then, that under conditions of choice between aggressive and nonaggressive . . . social action, sexual stimulation will be associated with less rather than more aggression. . . .” (personal communication). These findings may be viewed as consistent with social facilitation theory rather than with a theory of general arousal. In general, it seems that exposure to erotica may lead to increased sexual activity immediately following exposure, if and only if there is an established pattern of sexual behavior.
There are many circumstances for which that generalization does not hold. For example, boredom with erotica may set in very rapidly Howard, and others exposed normal healthy males to pornographic materials for ninety minutes per day for fifteen days and found that “pornography is an innocuous stimulus which leads quickly to satiation and that public concern is misplaced”.
In a study which had married couples view erotic movies once per week over a twelve-week period, Mann, Sidman, and Starr found that a relatively high level of sexual activity occurred on movie-viewing nights, although the average amount of sexual activity over the three months changed only slightly: “Completing daily checklists [of sexual behavior] appeared to facilitate sexual activity more than viewing erotic films. Results appeared most concordant with social learning theory and failed to support the position that viewing erotic films produced harmful social consequences”. Mann and others reanalyzed these data to determine if there was a satiation effect with repeated exposure to erotic films. “The findings indicated that these movies had become less and less effective elicitors of sexual reactions with successive presentations”. These data agree with a limited but somewhat similar study by Brown, Amoroso, and Ware, which showed similar transient increases in normal sexual behavior.
A brief report by Diener and others of a study using noninvasive observation methods and the “dropped-wallet” technique measured altruism and honesty in relation to exposure to erotica. The authors compared returns from a pornographic bookstore and a general bookstore. More patrons returned wallets discovered while leaving the stores than did those who discovered a wallet while entering the stores. The authors concluded that “these data do indicate that exposure to erotic stimuli did not lead to an increase in the antisocial behavior of stealing”.
In summary, the variation of methods and study designs limits the conclusions one may draw from currently available studies. It is safe to say, however, that there are no data which suggest that erotic arousal per se leads to antisocial behavior and many data which suggest its effect is minimal, benign, and transient.
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