Study: Married People Who Begin Watching Porn Twice As Likely To Get Divorced
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- A recent study finds that married people who begin to watch pornography are twice as likely to get divorced as those who don't.
According to Time, the study used data obtained by the General Social Survey, which tracks happiness in a person's marriage, porn consumption and marital status. Over 2,000 participants across three time periods took part in the survey, as researchers focused on people's porn-watching habits.
The study found that 11 percent of people who began to watch porn between the first two times they were interviewed were divorced by the second time researchers talked to them, compared to just 6 percent of people whose porn-watching habits didn't change. However, 16 percent of married women who started watching porn by themselves got divorced.
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"We don't think it's the relationship quality leading to the porn use and divorce," Samuel Perry, lead author and assistant sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma, told Time. "We are pretty confident about establishing the directional effects."
The study also found that women who stopped watching porn were nearly one-third as likely to be divorced as those who continued to watch. The findings were negligible among men who watched and who didn't.
Perry told Time researchers don't know why there was more of an impact on women than men.
"That's a bit surprising because everything else I've seen on porn use in relationship suggests that men's marriages are more negatively affected by their porn use, primarily because they're using it more often for the purposes of masturbation rather than intimacy," Perry said.
The study was presented at the 2016 American Sociological Association meeting.