Although the term “narcissist” is used by all types of people to refer to some personal characteristics of the people they come across in their daily lives, the truth is that this concept is also a category used by psychology. scientific. That is, it has been statistically linked to some personal characteristics, other personality traits and certain tendencies when behaving.
And, for a few years, one of the tendencies that could characterize narcissistic people is the propensity to consume more pornography than average This is, at least, what can be deduced from research published in the Journal of sex & marital therapy.
What sense does it make that pornography consumption is significantly higher in narcissistic people? According to the team of researchers who led the study, this is due to the way in which the classic narcissist focuses on himself when seeking pleasure.
Unlike what happens in other people, who seek reciprocity in pleasurable experiences, narcissists are more likely to use others as a simple means to obtain what they are looking for. According to this interpretation, pornography consumption adapts perfectly to this type of demands ; Most situations, the performances and even the way it is filmed accentuate the instrumental role of the actors who appear in the scene, making them seem like artificial beings that move only to satisfy whoever is watching.
That is, this would be a characteristic that expresses two traits that were already known about narcissistic people: the lack of empathic connections and a more intense sexual motivation than normal in other population groups
For this research, a group of more than 250 people (63% of whom were women) whose age ranged between 18 and 61 years was used as a sample.
Each of these people completed a series of standardized personality tests, which made it possible to evaluate the extent to which they were more or less narcissistic. In addition, they answered some questions about their habits when consuming pornography, or they could indicate that they did not consume it.
Interesting results
About 80% of people who participated said they had voluntarily viewed online pornography at some point, and 44% of them said this was part of their current habits. On average, they consumed about 85 minutes of pornography a week.
But the main discovery was that it was found a significant relationship between the narcissism score obtained in personality tests and the amount of pornography viewed
This means, among other things, that the group of participants who had seen online pornography on some occasion included a significantly larger number of narcissists than the group of those who had never seen it.
But, in addition, the correlation between the degree of narcissism also corresponded to the amount of pornography viewed, that is, the way in which this activity was incorporated into the daily lives of these people. The greater the frequency in which these scenes were viewed, the greater the possibility of belonging to the group of people with a higher score in narcissism, and those who were still watching pornography at that time were more narcissistic than those who no longer did so. .
Apparently, these results could lead us to think that it is the consumption of pornography that makes us score higher in this personality trait. However, We must remember that correlation does not equal causation From this study we have seen the description of what there is, but it is not known what produces what, in what direction the causality goes.
In other words, it could be that seeing these types of products made us more narcissistic, but it could also simply be the case that narcissistic people initially consumed more of this type of content on the Internet. To get an idea of what is really happening, we will have to wait for more research on the subject.
