The Associations between Pornography Addiction and Moral Judgement among Youth in Malaysia

Abstract

Pornography addiction has become a widespread problem given the issues of mental health problems and sexually unappealing acts associated with it. The dominant explanation for this problem is how pornography is able to affect one’s moral foundation moderated by other factors such as personality, political ideology and also one’s age. However, the limitations in this study impeded this study to have a better and accurate result such as the use of convenience sampling, acquiescence bias, low number of respondents and inability to determine the causality of this study. In this cross-sectional study, we used a convenience sampling method to collect data from respondents that were young adults. Then utilized the hierarchical multiple regression analysis and Pearson correlation to find the association between pornography addiction and one’s moral judgement. One-Way ANOVA test and T-test was used to investigate the role of demographic factors i.e. age and gender upon the two dominant variables. These research findings indicate association of pornography addiction upon one’s moral foundation i.e. the Betrayal/Loyalty, Subversion/Authority and Degradation/Sanctity. There were differences of pornography addiction based on age and gender. Additionally, the difference was found on moral judgment of Loyalty/Betrayal between male and female. Implications for future researchers who study pornography to use these results to expand the literature. Eventually, the impact of pornography addiction on people must be underlined so that it will be recognized at the national level.