Study Says: Citizens In States That Back The Winning Party Search For More Porn After Elections

from the target-those-ads... dept

With the Republicans handily winning a whole bunch of House seats in the elections, apparently you can expect the amount of searching for internet porn to increase in the states that voted Republican. Sound ridiculous? Yes, but apparently it's science. On The Media points us to the news of a new study that looked at porn searches before and after elections and found that they tend to increase in states that support the "winning" party. Of course, I'd take these results with a pretty serious grain of salt, but the study's authors note that they're statistically significant. You can read the whole study (pdf) if you'd like. The abstract is:

The current study examined whether or not individuals who vicariously win a competition seek out pornography relatively more often than individuals who vicariously lose a competition. By examining a portion of Google keyword searches during the 2004, 2006 and 2008 US election cycles, the relative popularity of online pornography keywords searches was computed for each state and the District of Columbia the week before and the week after each election. Consistent with the Challenge Hypothesis, following all three election cycles, individuals located in states voting for the winning political party tended to search for pornography keywords relatively more often than individuals residing in states voting for the losing political party.

The "Challenge Hypothesis," if you're unfamiliar with it, is the idea that competition itself increases testosterone in men, and winning a competition increases testosterone even more -- and this includes just witnessing the competition. So, other studies have apparently found increases in testosterone in men watching their favorite sports teams win. So this study looked at whether or not porn searches might act as a proxy for such increased testosterone.

Filed Under: challenge hypothesis, elections, porn