Robert Jensen PORNOGRAPHY AND THE LIMITS OF EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH

“experts,” even when the questions are primarily about human values. Not surprisingly, experimental laboratory research has played an important role in the debate over pornography in the past three decades. Advocates of regulation, both feminist and conservative, cite studies showing links between pornography and violence, whereas opponents of regulation point to other studies that show no link or that are inconclusive. One government commission read the evidence to support increased regulation (Attorney General’s Commission, 1986); an earlier commission used the evidence available at that time to support lifting most regulation (Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, 1970). Experimental research on pornography’s effects looks at the perceptual and behavioral effects of viewing or reading sexually explicit material. A typical study might expose groups of subjects to different types or levels of sexually explicit material for comparison to a control group that views nonsexual material. Researchers look for significant differences between the groups on a measure of, for example, male attitudes toward rape. One such measure could be subjects’ assessments of the suffering experienced by sexual assault victims or subjects’ judgments of the appropriate prison sentence for a rapist. From such controlled testing—measuring the effect of an experimental stimulus (exposure to pornography) on a dependent variable (attitudes toward women or sex) in randomly selected groups— researchers make claims, usually tentative, about causal relationships.