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Just saw that a commentary I wrote is now live.
The original paper (Lewczuk et al., 2020) is a really interesting work that was actually a pre-registered replication of a previous study of mine.
Please do RT to share, if you don't mind.
below (1/n) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/add.15326
The original paper (Lewczuk et al., 2020) is a really interesting work that was actually a pre-registered replication of a previous study of mine.
Please do RT to share, if you don't mind.
below (1/n) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/add.15326
My paper-the one on which this replication was based-was desk rejected at Addiction. But, two years later, this one made it through! That's a really cool thing and shows that **the** most influential addiction journal is taking this stuff seriously (2/n) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7044607/
What Lewczuk and colleagues (it's weird referring to them this way, because Karol and Mateusz are friends/co-authors of mine) show is that, among users of pornography, moral disapproval of pornography is indeed related to self-reported addiction (3/n) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.15272
This is a really consistent finding! It's found in Malaysian samples and American samples and (with this paper) nationally representative Polish samples and longitudinal studies and Mturk workers and undergrads and many other samples... (4/n)
effects vary, sometimes moral disapproval is a stronger predictor than porn use itself, sometimes it's not. But, the notion that, among porn users, moral disapproval predicts self-reported addiction, replicates. As the researcher who first advanced this, this is awesome! (5/n)
Indeed, this idea was central to a target article @socofthesacred and I wrote a couple of years ago in Archives of Sexual Behavior (6/n) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-018-1248-x
To be fair, @socofthesacred and I have written a lot about this topic... in several outlets (7/n) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224499.2018.1427204
And, more or less, @socofthesacred wrote a whole book on the topic (though the book focuses on this phenomena in evangelical christian circles) (8/n) https://global.oup.com/academic/product/addicted-to-lust-9780190844219?cc=us&lang=en&
This link between moral disapproval and self-reported pornography addiction is so consistent that, when the World Health Organization's working group on impulse control disorders laid out the criteria for compulsive sexual behavior disorder, they mention this moral piece (9/n)
Specifically, the WHO working group notes that distress related to moral disapproval or religious disapproval of sexual behaviors is **not sufficient** to diagnose compulsive sexual behavior disorder (10/n)
This is super cool and important, because moral disapproval can lead people with low levels of behavioral dysregulation (or, more simply, their behavior is not out of control) to seek treatment for "porn addiction" even when there's no addiction (11/n) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-018-1301-9
But, Lewczuk and colleagues take it a step further and apply the same paradigm to video games and excessive internet use and social media use. What they find is quite stark, in my opinion: all of the behavioral addictions are predicted by moral disapproval among users (12/n).
Now, there are several plausible ways to interpret this finding. The way that Lewczuk and colleagues generally move toward is that, perhaps, the idea that moral disapproval is not unique to pornography use or sex. Instead, maybe all addiction implies moral disapproval (13/n)
This makes a fair bit of sense! people who feel their behavior is out of control are probably likely to think that behavior is morally wrong, and there is some evidence that substance users with addictions do (sometimes) find their behaviors morally inappropriate (14/n)
In this sense, maybe the link between moral disapproval and self-reported addiction to pornography is not unique at all, and, if so, maybe the research linking the two domains is highlighting a non-existent problem... obviously, I think there are other possibilities here (15/n)
Returning to my commentary, there are a few issues that I think this paper raises for the entire field of behavioral addiction research, chief of which is quoted below (16/n)
If personal morality is consistently demonstrated to be predictive of controversial and ill-measured behavioral addictions (this area is plagued by atrocious measurement), this suggests that the "objective" criteria for such addictions might not be so objective (17/n)
In the paper that Lewczuk and colleagues based their replication on, we measured self-reported addiction by a single item "I believe I am addicted to pornography." For all addictions in this paper, Lewczuk and colleagues used the same single item approach (18/n)
In short, among people who engage in a behavior, the extent to which they morally disapprove of the behavior is related to the extent to which they self-report agreement with a single item of self-reported addiction (19/n).
This, obviously, does not an addiction make. More simply, it suggests that people who are distressed over a behavior they do more than they would like are also likely to say they disapprove of the behavior. Negative evaluations of the behavior correlate with each other (20/n)
However, more importantly, as I note in my commentary, using a range of methods and measures, our research group has found that the better way to understand the link between moral disapproval and self-reported addiction is as an interaction effect (21/n).
Take for example, our recent work in Clinical Psychological Science, where we show (using the super pretty InterActive utility from @connorjmccabe and @KMKing_Psych) that religiousness itself moderates links between pornography use and self-reported addiction (22/n)
In our recent Journal of Abnormal Psychology article, we showed basically the same thing, that moral disapproval of pornography does indeed moderation links between use and self-reported addiction (23/n)
In both cases, people who use frequently but don't morally disapprove of pornography use or who are below-average in religiousness tend to generally not find their use problematic and not report problems in their life because of use (24/n).
In short, use doesn't just seem to create problems for everyone, even high levels of use. This is actually a pretty consistent finding in the literature, as @beabothe has shown recently https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1743609520300321 (25/n)
and this matters! If moral disapproval is somehow driving problems for even a small subsample of people, there is a lot of potential for clinical misapplication of new diagnoses for behavioral addictions! (26/n)
Now, if clinicians are careful with these new diagnoses, maybe this won't happen. But, clinicians won't always be so careful. A few studies (s/o to @BrianDroubay for his work here) already show that more religious clinicians are more likely to diagnose sexual addiction (27/n).
and there is no clarification about the possible role of moral concerns for gaming disorder or even any literature outside of Lewczuk and colleagues paper that I commented on. In short, it's quite likely that morality is going to obscure the diagnostic process (28/n)
Which brings me to my final tweet, which is more of just a note from the paper itself. Behavioral addictions are here to stay, most likely, and we need to do a better job making sure they aren't used and abused in diagnostic settings (29/final).
the commentary, for now, is freely available online, so please feel free to give it a read. It's only 750 words. https://twitter.com/JoshuaGrubbsPhD/status/1339973693720674307?s=20
