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Does conscious AI deserve rights?
If machines develop consciousness, or if we manage to give it to them, the human-robot dynamic will forever be different.
08 July, 2020
- Does AI—and, more specifically, conscious AI—deserve moral rights? In this thought exploration, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, ethics and tech professor Joanna Bryson, philosopher and cognitive scientist Susan Schneider, physicist Max Tegmark, philosopher Peter Singer, and bioethicist Glenn Cohen all weigh in on the question of AI rights.
- Given the grave tragedy of slavery throughout human history, philosophers and technologists must answer this question ahead of technological development to avoid humanity creating a slave class of conscious beings.
- One potential safeguard against that? Regulation. Once we define the context in which AI requires rights, the simplest solution may be to not build that thing.
What did Hannah Arendt really mean by the banality of evil?
The banality-of-evil thesis was a flashpoint for controversy.
29 June, 2020
Can one do evil without being evil?
<p> This was the puzzling question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with when she reported for <em>The New Yorker</em> in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for organising the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps in support of the Nazi's Final Solution.</p><p>Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was 'neither perverted nor sadistic', but 'terrifyingly normal'. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case, <em>Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil</em> (1963). Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his 'thoughtlessness', a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann 'never realised what he was doing' due to an 'inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else'. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he 'commit[ted] crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong'. </p><p>Arendt dubbed these collective characteristics of Eichmann 'the banality of evil': he was not inherently evil, but merely shallow and clueless, a 'joiner', in the words of one contemporary interpreter of Arendt's thesis: he was a man who drifted into the Nazi Party, in search of purpose and direction, not out of deep ideological belief. In Arendt's telling, Eichmann reminds us of the protagonist in Albert Camus's novel <em>The Stranger</em> (1942), who randomly and casually kills a man, but then afterwards feels no remorse. There was no particular intention or obvious evil motive: the deed just 'happened'.</p>
<p>This wasn't Arendt's first, somewhat superficial impression of Eichmann. Even 10 years after his trial in Israel, she wrote in 1971:</p><blockquote>I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer [ie Eichmann] which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.</blockquote><p>The banality-of-evil thesis was a flashpoint for controversy. To Arendt's critics, it seemed absolutely inexplicable that Eichmann could have played a key role in the Nazi genocide yet have no evil intentions. Gershom Scholem, a fellow philosopher (and theologian), wrote to Arendt in 1963 that her banality-of-evil thesis was merely a slogan that 'does not impress me, certainly, as the product of profound analysis'. Mary McCarthy, a novelist and good friend of Arendt, <a href="http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/essays/note-banality-evil" target="_blank">voiced</a> sheer incomprehension: '[I]t seems to me that what you are saying is that Eichmann lacks an inherent human quality: the capacity for thought, consciousness – conscience. But then isn't he a monster simply?'</p><p>The controversy continues to the present day. The philosopher Alan Wolfe, in <em>Political Evil: What It Is and How to Combat It</em> (2011), criticised Arendt for 'psychologising' – that is, avoiding – the issue of evil as evil by defining it in the limited context of Eichmann's humdrum existence. Wolfe argued that Arendt concentrated too much on <em>who</em> Eichmann was, rather than <em>what</em> Eichmann did. For Arendt's critics, this focus on Eichmann's insignificant, banal life seemed to be an 'absurd digression' from his evil deeds.</p>
<p>Other recent critics have documented Arendt's historical errors, which led her to miss a deeper evil in Eichmann, when she claimed that his evil was 'thought-defying', as Arendt wrote to the philosopher Karl Jaspers three years after the trial. The historian Deborah Lipstadt, the defendant in David Irving's Holocaust-denial libel trial, decided in 2000, cites documentation released by the Israeli government for use in the legal proceeding. It proves, Lipstadt asserts in <em>The Eichmann Trial</em> (2011), that Arendt's use of the term 'banal' was flawed:</p><blockquote>The memoir [by Eichmann] released by Israel for use in my trial reveals the degree to which Arendt was wrong about Eichmann. It is permeated with expressions of Nazi ideology… [Eichmann] accepted and espoused the idea of racial purity.</blockquote><p>Lipstadt further argues that Arendt failed to explain why Eichmann and his associates would have attempted to destroy evidence of their war crimes, if he was indeed unaware of his wrongdoing.</p><p>In <em>Eichmann Before Jerusalem</em> (2014), the German historian Bettina Stangneth reveals another side to him besides the banal, seemingly apolitical man, who was just acting like any other 'ordinary' career-oriented bureaucrat. Drawing on audiotapes of interviews with Eichmann by the Nazi journalist William Sassen, Stangneth shows Eichmann as a self-avowed, aggressive Nazi ideologue strongly committed to Nazi beliefs, who showed no remorse or guilt for his role in the Final Solution – a radically evil Third Reich operative living inside the deceptively normal shell of a bland bureaucrat. Far from being 'thoughtless', Eichmann had plenty of thoughts – thoughts of genocide, carried out on behalf of his beloved Nazi Party. On the tapes, Eichmann admitted to a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde dualism:</p><blockquote>I, '[t]he cautious bureaucrat,' that was me, yes indeed. But … this cautious bureaucrat was attended by a … a fanatical [Nazi] warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood, which is my birthright…</blockquote><p>Arendt completely missed this radically evil side of Eichmann when she wrote 10 years after the trial that there was 'no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives'. This only underscores the banality – and falsity – of the banality-of-evil thesis. And though Arendt never said that Eichmann was just an innocent 'cog' in the Nazi bureaucracy<em>,</em> nor defended Eichmann as 'just following orders' – both common misunderstandings of her findings on Eichmann – her critics, including Wolfe and Lipstadt, remain unsatisfied.</p>
<p>So what should we conclude about Arendt's claim that Eichmann (as well as other Germans) <em>did</em> evil without <em>being</em> evil?</p><p>The question is a puzzle because Arendt missed an opportunity to investigate the larger meaning of Eichmann's particular evil by not expanding her study of him into a broader study of evil's nature. In <em>The Origins of Totalitarianism</em> (1951), published well before the Eichmann trial, Arendt said:</p><blockquote>It is inherent in our entire [Western] philosophical tradition that we cannot conceive of a 'radical evil'…</blockquote><p>Instead of using the Eichmann case as a way forward to advance the tradition's understanding of radical evil, Arendt decided that his evil was banal, that is, 'thought-defying'. By taking a narrow legalistic, formalistic approach to the trial – she emphasised that there were no deeper issues at stake beyond the legal facts of Eichmann's guilt or innocence – Arendt automatically set herself up for failure as to the deeper why of Eichmann's evil.</p><p>Yet in her writings before <em>Eichmann in Jerusalem</em>, she actually took an opposite position. In <em>The Origins of Totalitarianism</em>, she argued that the evil of the Nazis was absolute and inhuman, <em>not</em> shallow and incomprehensible, the metaphorical embodiment of hell itself: '[T]he reality of concentration camps resembles nothing so much as medieval pictures of Hell.'</p>
<p>By declaring in her pre-Eichmann trial writings that absolute evil, exemplified by the Nazis, was driven by an audacious, monstrous intention to abolish humanity itself, Arendt was echoing the spirit of philosophers such as F W J Schelling and Plato, who did not shy away from investigating the deeper, more demonic aspects of evil. But this view changed when Arendt met Eichmann, whose bureaucratic emptiness suggested no such diabolical profundity, but only prosaic careerism and the 'inability to think'. At that point, her earlier imaginative thinking about moral evil was distracted, and the 'banality of evil' slogan was born. Moreover, Arendt died in 1975: perhaps if she had lived longer she could have clarified the puzzles surrounding the banality-of-evil thesis, which still confound critics to this day. But this we shall never know.</p><p>Thus we are left with her original thesis as it stands. What is the basic confusion behind it? Arendt never did reconcile her impressions of Eichmann's bureaucratic banality with her earlier searing awareness of the evil, inhuman acts of the Third Reich. She saw the ordinary-looking functionary, but not the ideologically evil warrior. How Eichmann's humdrum life could co-exist with that 'other' monstrous evil puzzled her. Nevertheless, Arendt never downplayed Eichmann's guilt, repeatedly described him as a war criminal, and concurred with his death sentence as handed down by the Israeli court. Though Eichmann's motives were, for her, obscure and thought-defying, his genocidal acts were not. In the final analysis, Arendt <em>did</em> see the true horror of Eichmann's evil.<img src="https://metrics.aeon.co/count/ba78729b-0e36-4c5c-8ac3-580ef152cb42.gif" alt="Aeon counter – do not remove"></p><p>Thomas White</p><p>This article was originally published at <a href="https://aeon.co/?utm_campaign=republished-article" target="_blank">Aeon</a> and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the <a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-the-banality-of-evil" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
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Politics is now a dating deal-breaker, according to new research
A massive Dating.com study reveals just how important politics are in the dating world right now.
12 June, 2020
Pixabay
- According to a new survey from a popular dating website, 84 percent of people currently looking for a relationship through dating apps won't even consider dating someone with opposite political views.
- Additionally, 67 percent of the dating site's users have admitted to previously ending a relationship due to opposing political views.
- Licensed marriage therapist Dr. Gary Brown says that there is more "venom and animosity" now than there was during the Vietnam War.
<ul class="ee-ul"></ul><div class="redactor-editor" dir="ltr" placeholder="Start writing..."><p>We are living in an extremely polarizing time in politics. With an American president that you either wildly support or vehemently oppose, and a world that's been pushed to the brink in more ways than one in the last few years, it's no surprise that conversations about politics could lead to make or break moments in budding new romances.</p>According to <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/datingcom-reveals-sharing-your-political-party-might-be-a-dating-deal-breaker-301073270.html" target="_blank">a new survey</a> from popular dating website Dating.com, 84 percent of people currently looking for a relationship through dating apps won't even consider dating someone with opposite political views, and 67 percent of users admitted to previously ending a relationship due to opposing political views.</div><ul class="ee-ul"></ul>
Exploring the connections between romance and politics
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzM4OTA0Ni9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxMDEyNDU2N30.PtZ8GeZv4bc8U0wTTwP_zPcmzZq2oul73sSsqDW06Tk/img.jpg?width=980" id="4245b" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="6d5d17ac69c91176f0090f738a5badd5" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="vote pins concept of voter registration" />Sex and politics have been closely linked for a long time.
Photo by 3dfoto on Shutterstock
<p>From the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/14/us/politics/george-and-kellyanne-conway.html" target="_blank">extremely public disagreements</a> between White House advisor Kellyanne Conway and her husband, to the tense argument you and your partner had on voting day, politics can be a breaking point for any relationship.</p><p>Sex and intimacy provide a strong driving force for humans that reaches far beyond the confines of the bedroom. Our personal relationships influence our behaviors, our thoughts, our motivations, and our even our political opinions, to some extent.</p><p><strong>If your sexual preferences align, your political values might, too. </strong></p><p><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886916310364" target="_blank">According to this 2017 study</a>, traditional behaviors in the bedroom (what some might deem to be <a href="https://sofiagray.com/vanilla-sex-gets-a-bad-wrap-heres-why-its-actually-great/" target="_blank">"vanilla" sex</a>) can be closely related to more conservative orientations, whereas more adventurous sexual endeavors can suggest more liberal ideas. </p><p>Whether you're swiping right or scrolling through, it can be hard to find a match who's values and opinions are in line with yours. While some minor disagreements and conflicts can actually <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/conscious-communication/201703/why-conflict-is-healthy-relationships" target="_blank">be healthy in a relationship</a>, pairing up with someone who has opposing political views might just mean you have two very different sets of morals that may not bring out the best in each other.</p><p><strong>Defining dating expectations allows you to see how important political views are in the beginning of a relationship. </strong></p><p><a href="https://www.itsjustlunch.com/do-politics-and-dating-make-a-match" target="_blank">According to a study</a> released by It's Just Lunch, 50 percent of single men and women stated that dating someone with opposing political views was fine for short-term relationships but would not be ideal for long-term commitments. </p><p>If you're looking for something casual and fun, perhaps politics doesn't need to play as big of a role as it would if you were swiping right to find a long-term relationship. </p><p><strong>Navigating politics and relationships is more difficult now than ever before.</strong></p><p>That same study by It's Just Lunch has around 40 percent of men and women claiming they believe it's "too risky" to bring up politics on a first date. </p><p>It's not just dating website studies - therapists around the world are struggling to defuse politically-charged landmines in relationships. <a href="https://drgarybrowntherapy.com/" target="_blank">Gary Brown</a>, Ph.D. and licensed marriage therapist explains to <a href="https://www.womenshealthmag.com/life/a19943112/relationship-therapists-politics-advice/" target="_blank">Women's Health Magazine</a> that now more than ever we are living in such an intense political climate that it is undoubtedly causing tension not just in romantic relationships but in friendships and among colleagues as well. </p><p>"It's everywhere," Brown explains. "I can't remember a time, not even during the Vietnam war, where there was as much venom and animosity as there is now. Even people who deeply love each other are falling victim to the 'politics of personal destruction', where it's not enough to disagree with someone but you have to destroy them and everything they stand for in the process." </p>How to (respectfully) broach the topic of politics with a potential match
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzM4OTA0NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYwOTU4NjY2M30.aP7RVtnmbxWyR8TvF2X4KkAOPGQzyj_yH1vSz9irjV0/img.jpg?width=1245&coordinates=0%2C52%2C0%2C52&height=700" id="25b1e" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="4dee3450c09733a0f67664f4896e2621" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="man and women disagreeing arguing on couch" />Polarizing political views can be a deal-breaker - here's how to navigate the topic of politics on a date.
Photo by fizkes on Shutterstock
<p>"During a time where we are surrounded by politics, it is important to look at the impact that it has on the online dating industry," Vice President of Dating.com, Maria Sullivan, explains. "We have seen a huge increase in political terms being added to user profiles."</p><p>According to the study, 72 percent of singles would rather you flaunt that you voted at all (rather than who specifically you voted for) in your bio. More than half the participants surveyed said that bringing up a discussion about politics too early can be a huge turn-off.</p><p>So how do you make sure you make your view known while not being too pushy about the subject too early on? </p><p><strong>Use non-confrontational language and keep things vague in the beginning. </strong>If voting is important to you, make that known and suggest that you're open to talking politics with anyone who is interested. </p><p><strong>Choose the right time.</strong> Perhaps the first words you say shouldn't be an accusatory statement about who they voted for and why. Bringing up political views is an important test to see if the match is right, but choose the right time to insert politics into the conversation. </p><p><strong>Be open-minded (or respectful, at the very least).</strong> While you may have a hard stance on your political views (as many people do), being respectful of other people's opinions is often the best approach and the thing that might open the conversation up in a healthy way.</p>
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Why do you believe what you do? Run some diagnostics on it
Does what you believe in come from reason? Or just your community?
08 June, 2020
John Moore/Getty Images
Many of the beliefs that play a fundamental role in our worldview are largely the result of the communities in which we've been immersed.
<p> Religious parents tend to beget religious children, liberal educational institutions tend to produce liberal graduates, blue states stay mostly blue, and red ones stay mostly red. Of course, some people, through their own sheer intelligence, might be able to see through fallacious reasoning, detect biases and, as a result, resist the social influences that lead most of us to belief. But I'm not that special, and so learning how susceptible my beliefs are to these sorts of influences makes me a bit squirmy.</p><p>Let's work with a hypothetical example. Suppose I'm raised among atheists and firmly believe that God doesn't exist. I realise that, had I grown up in a religious community, I would almost certainly have believed in God. Furthermore, we can imagine that, had I grown up a theist, I would have been exposed to all the considerations that I take to be relevant to the question of whether God exists: I would have learned science and history, I would have heard all the same arguments for and against the existence of God. The difference is that I would <em>interpret</em> this evidence differently. Divergences in belief result from the fact that people weigh the evidence for and against theism in varying ways. It's not as if pooling resources and having a conversation would result in one side convincing the other – we wouldn't have had centuries of religious conflict if things were so simple. Rather, each side will insist that the balance of considerations supports its position – and this insistence will be a product of the social environments that people on that side were raised in.</p><p>The you-just-believe-that-because challenge is meant to make us suspicious of our beliefs, to motivate us to reduce our confidence, or even abandon them completely. But what exactly does this challenge amount to? The fact that I have my particular beliefs as a result of growing up in a certain community is just a boring psychological fact about me and is not, in itself, evidence for or against anything so grand as the existence of God. So, you might wonder, if these psychological facts about us are not themselves evidence for or against our worldview, why would learning them motivate any of us to reduce our confidence in such matters?</p>
<p>The <em>method</em> of believing whatever one's social surroundings tell one to believe is not reliable. So, when I learn about the social influences on my belief, I learn that I've formed my beliefs using an unreliable method. If it turns out that my thermometer produces its readings using an unreliable mechanism, I cease to trust the thermometer. Similarly, learning that my beliefs were produced by an unreliable process means that I should cease to trust them too.</p><p>But in the hypothetical example, do I really hold that <em>my</em> beliefs were formed by an unreliable mechanism? I might think as follows: 'I formed my atheistic beliefs as a result of growing up in <em>my</em> particular community, not as a result of growing up in <em>some community or another</em>. The fact that there are a bunch of communities out there that inculcate their members with false beliefs doesn't mean that my community does. So I deny that my beliefs were formed by an unreliable method. Luckily for me, they were formed by an extremely reliable method: they are the result of growing up among intelligent well-informed people with a sensible worldview.'</p><p>The thermometer analogy, then, is inapt. Learning that I would have believed differently if I'd been raised by a different community is not like learning that <em>my</em> thermometer is unreliable. It's more like learning that my thermometer came from a store that sells a large number of unreliable thermometers. But the fact that the store sells unreliable thermometers doesn't mean I shouldn't trust the readings of my particular thermometer. After all, I might have excellent reasons to think that I got lucky and bought one of the few reliable ones.</p>
<p>There's something fishy about the 'I got lucky' response because I would think <em>the very same thing</em> if I were raised in a community that I take to believe falsehoods. If I'm an atheist, I might think: 'Luckily, I was raised by people who are well-educated, take science seriously, and aren't in the grip of old-fashioned religious dogma.' But if I were a theist, I would think something along the lines of: 'If I'd been raised among arrogant people who believe that there is nothing greater than themselves, I might never have personally experienced God's grace, and would have ended up with a completely distorted view of reality.' The fact that the 'I got lucky' response is a response <em>anyone</em> could give seems to undermine its legitimacy.</p><p>Despite the apparent fishiness of the 'I got lucky' response in the case of religious belief, this response is perfectly sensible in other cases. Return to the thermometers. Suppose that, when I was looking for a thermometer, I knew very little about the different types and picked a random one off the shelf. After learning that the store sells many unreliable thermometers, I get worried and do some serious research. I discover that the particular thermometer I bought is produced by a reputable company whose thermometers are extraordinarily reliable. There's nothing wrong with thinking: 'How lucky I am to have ended up with <em>this</em> excellent thermometer!'</p><p>What's the difference? Why does it seem perfectly reasonable to think I got lucky about the thermometer I bought but not to think that I got lucky with the community I was raised in? Here's the answer: my belief that the community I was raised in is a reliable one is <em>itself</em>, plausibly, a result of growing up in that community. If I don't take for granted the beliefs that my community instilled in me, then I'll find that I have no particular reason to think that my community is more reliable than others. If we're evaluating the reliability of some belief-forming method, we can't use beliefs that are the result of that very method in support of that method's reliability.</p><p>So, if we ought to abandon our socially influenced beliefs, it is for the following reason: deliberation about whether to maintain or abandon a belief, or set of beliefs, due to the worries about how the beliefs were formed must be conducted from a perspective that doesn't rely on the beliefs in question. Here's another way of putting the point: when we're concerned about some belief we have, and are wondering whether to give it up, we're engaged in doubt. When we doubt, we set aside some belief or cluster of beliefs, and we wonder whether the beliefs in question can be recovered from a perspective that doesn't rely on those beliefs. Sometimes, we learn that they can be recovered once they've been subject to doubt, and other times we learn that they can't.</p>
<p>What's worrisome about the realisation that our moral, religious and political beliefs are heavily socially influenced is that many ways of recovering belief from doubt are not available to us in this case. We can't make use of ordinary arguments in support of these beliefs because, in the perspective of doubt, the legitimacy of those very arguments is being questioned: after all, we are imagining that we find the arguments for our view more compelling than the arguments for alternative views as a result of the very social influences with which we're concerned. In the perspective of doubt, we also can't take the fact that we believe what we do as evidence for the belief's truth, because we know that we believe what we do simply because we were raised in a certain environment, and the fact that we were raised here rather than there is no good reason to think that our beliefs are the correct ones.</p><p>It's important to realise that the concern about beliefs being socially influenced is worrisome <em>only</em> if we're deliberating about whether to maintain belief from the perspective of doubt. For recall that the facts about how my particular beliefs were caused are not, in themselves, evidence for or against any particular religious, moral or political outlook. So if you were thinking about whether to abandon your beliefs from a perspective in which you're willing to make use of all of the reasoning and arguments that you normally use, you would simply think that you got lucky – just as you might have got lucky buying a particular thermometer, or reaching the train moments before it shuts its doors, or striking up a conversation on an airplane with someone who ends up being the love of your life.</p><p>There's no general problem with thinking that we've been lucky – sometimes we are. The worry is just that, from the perspective of doubt<em>,</em> we don't have the resources to justify the claim that we've been lucky. What's needed to support such a belief is part of what's being questioned.<img src="https://metrics.aeon.co/count/cf6284e9-e1cb-47ad-85c7-e7734dd85329.gif" alt="Aeon counter – do not remove"></p><p>Miriam Schoenfield</p><p>This article was originally published at <a href="https://aeon.co/?utm_campaign=republished-article" target="_blank">Aeon</a> and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the <a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/why-do-you-believe-what-you-do-run-some-diagnostics-on-it" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
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Photo by Lluis Gene / AFP via Getty Images
- A new study at the University of Southern Alabama investigates the pornography viewing habits of religious, heterosexual men.
- Those expressing high degrees of scrupulosity feel more guilt and shame when watching porn.
- The researchers found no correlation with viewing frequency and religiosity, however.
<p>Pornhub is one of the most insightful data companies on the planet. Every year, the website releases a review that reveals the world's sexual temperament. In 2019, an <a href="https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review" target="_blank">interesting statistic</a> emerged regarding the United States: the top nine states viewing the longest (per visit) are all in the Bible Belt. </p><p>While it's long been suggested that religious believers consume more pornography (alongside engaging in other solicitous acts), it's difficult to gather reliable data. Pornography is not a topic of general discussion, especially in America. Our Puritanical mindset runs so deep that white supremacists and Holocaust deniers maintain social media handles while you risk getting banned if you show a female nipple. </p><p>A team of researchers—Nicholas Borgogna and Ryan McDermott at the University of Southern Alabama and Anthony Isacco at Chatham University—wanted to better understand the relationship between religiosity and problematic pornography in heterosexual men. Their <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10720162.2020.1751361" target="_blank">study</a>, published in <em>Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity</em>, sheds light on the psychology of these religious individuals. </p><p>What is problematic pornography? One longstanding notion involves the "orgasm gap." A <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25131299/?from_single_result=25131299&expanded_search_query=25131299" target="_blank">2014 study</a> notes men climax in 85 percent of sexual encounters; women, 63 percent. As most pornography focuses on male pleasure, this psychology seems to translate into actual bedrooms. </p><p>Study volunteers self-reported problems with their pornography usage. These include functional ailments: relationship issues, mental health problems, lack of emotional intimacy, sexism, and aggression. While Pornhub searches are skewed more toward anime pornography than violence, the latter is an ongoing issue in porn.</p>
Porn Science: Female Sexual Response Is Contrary to Popular Belief, with Daniel Bergner
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="4c3eae52a2e5bf67c296680e315daaf4"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VCb_xbzjLG8?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p>There's also disappointment. In 2017, I traveled to a pornography convention in Las Vegas to discuss the <a href="https://medium.com/@derekberes/the-future-of-virtual-sex-a8f1d3b66b9e" target="_blank">future of sex</a> through the lens of virtual reality. Brian Shuster, founder of HoloGirlsVR, warned about the dangers of believing screens translate to real life. Speaking about teenage boys grappling with newfound sexuality, he says, </p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"The girls they find don't look like the girls they see in videos. First sexual experiences are a disappointment on both sides; probably the first thousand sexual experiences people have are with their computer. They say, 'I'm willing to have sex with real people, but I'm not willing to put in that level of work and commitment and potential disease and pregnancy for a relatively poor sexual experience.'"</p><p>This speaks to the problems. The team then wanted to know if religious men become addicted to violating moral codes—the old "I'm being naughty" mindset. They speculate religious men experience psychological distress from violating their faith's ethics when viewing outlawed material. Borgogna and crew recruited 224 volunteers to measure nine self-reported items, such as perceived compulsivity, problematic access efforts, and emotional distress. </p><p>The team focused on three principles: scrupulosity, an obsessive-compulsive disorder centered on guilt or obsession around religious perfectionism; traditional masculine ideology; and self-compassion, or maintaining an "emotionally positive self-attitude." Before reading responses, they hypothesized scrupulosity and masculine ideology would positively correlate to problematic pornography viewing (with the former providing a strong correlation) while volunteers with high self-compassion scores would not be ridden by guilt.</p><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzMwNDcyMC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1NjE2NjMxM30.9_sfDYmC921gEQ6SejjCzMwDZaLtSXyrT3U3Lw0Gvas/img.jpg?width=1245&coordinates=0%2C68%2C0%2C19&height=700" id="fd20d" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="cd6c04b34ca6cb0d5d61b57a6da35f6e" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
The reverend Vernon Mitchell talks to women at a strip club as part of a process to determine which segments of the show should be censored, London, 1st November 1960.
Photo by Peter Dunne/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
<p>They were partly right. Scrupulosity showed the highest correlation. Self-compassion did not negatively correlate, however. They guessed higher self-compassion, being the antithesis of the rigid, perfectionistic model of scrupulosity, would allow for self-forgiveness. "Unfortunately," they conclude, "our data suggested the relationships to be non-significant." Traditional masculine ideology did not correlate positively either. </p><p>Interestingly, Borgogna found general religiosity is not associated with viewing frequency. Being religious does not mean you view more pornography. Yet for a subset of religious believers there is increased distress. They believe religiosity could be a "protective factor" against viewing frequency for a certain segment of the religious population. </p><p>The team hopes therapists use this information as pornography addiction is an under-discussed topic in clinical settings. They advise mental health practitioners to focus on religious-based obsessive thoughts leading to scrupulosity, the constant impulse to access pornography, and cyclical feelings of guilt and shame. </p><p>They also note viewing frequency is not necessarily correlated to relationship or mental health problems. Even a little can trigger negative feelings and psychological distress in those suffering from scrupulosity, while many in the Bible Belt (and beyond) feel no shame, religious or not. </p><p><span></span>--</p><p><em>Stay in touch with Derek on <a href="http://www.twitter.com/derekberes" target="_blank">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/DerekBeresdotcom" target="_blank">Facebook</a> and <a href="https://derekberes.substack.com/" target="_blank">Substack</a>. His next book is</em> "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."</p>
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