Deviant Sexual Thoughts and Behaviors: The Roles of Personality and Pornography Use

Although the nature and prevalence of deviant sexual thoughts and behaviors has been well investigated in forensic samples, far less attention has been paid to these phenomena in sub-clinical settings. A male undergraduate sample (N = 88) completed the Multidimensional Assessment of Sex and Aggression (MASA; Knight et al., 1994) as a measure of deviant sexual thoughts and behaviors, along with various measures of personality. First, we investigated possible personality correlates of deviant sexual thoughts and behaviors. In particular, we examined the roles of the Big Five personality traits (i.e., Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience; John & Srivastava, 1999), as well as the “Dark Triad” of personality (i.e., sub-clinical narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sub-clinical psychopathy; Paulhus & Williams, 2002) in their relationship to deviant sexual thoughts and behaviors. Second, we examined the nature of the previously established relationship between pornography use and deviant sexual behavior (Cooper et al., 2002). Specifically, we tested whether personality (e.g., sub-clinical psychopathy) moderated the relationship between pornography use and deviant sexual behavior. Results indicated that Neuroticism and sub-clinical psychopathy were the two main correlates of deviant sexual thoughts, whereas sub-clinical narcissism and subclinical psychopathy correlated with deviant sexual behavior. Furthermore, ANOVA analyses revealed that sub-clinical psychopathy moderated the relationship between pornography use and deviant sexual behavior. That is, pornography use was associated with high levels of deviant sexual behavior only for participants scoring high in sub-clinical psychopathy. Together, these results support Bandura's (1977) "reciprocal determinism" theory, in that it appears that individuals with certain personality characteristics are attracted to certain types of media content, and that these individuals are affected by that content differently than are other