LOS ANGELES — A study conducted by researchers at Brock University in Ontario, Canada found that those who identify as more religious are more likely to use pornographic search terms on Google than their less religious peers.
The researchers drew their conclusion after examining two years of data culled from Google Trends broken up by states in the U.S. They reported to have controlled for demographic variables.
“We observed moderate-to-large positive associations between: greater proportions of state-level religiosity and general web searching for sexual content and greater proportions of state-level conservatism and image-specific searching for sex,” the researchers wrote in the abstract.
For the purposes of the study, they divided states into categories, including those that are on the whole more religiously conservative and those that are politically conservative.
“Prominent political scandals and recent research suggest a paradoxical private attraction to sexual content on the political and religious right,” the researchers wrote, extrapolating from their findings.
But the researchers found that its two conservative groups exhibited nuanced differences. Most notably, the politically conservative searched for more specific sex terms (e.g., gay sex free porn, xxx), while the religious group sought out more generalized sex terms.
The researchers do offer an alternative — albeit unlikely — to their findings: that the percentage of people searching pornographic terms is driven up by the liberals and secular living in politically and/or religiously conservative states.