Photo: flickr/Caden Crawford
Google Trends has become a productive source of data for social scientists, particularly those interested in when and where people search for the word “porn”. First, they discovered that porn searches peaked in winter and early summer, a result that lead them to believe that there actually is a human mating season. Now, they’ve looked at the results by state, and found some more interesting patterns.
Perhaps not surprisingly, “higher percentages of Evangelical Protestants, theists, and biblical literalists in a state predict higher frequencies of searching for porn, as do higher church attendance rates.” The state with the highest search rate? You guessed it: Mississippi, followed closely by Texas. The authors conclude that “more salient, traditional religious influences in a state may influence residents–whether religious or not–toward more covert sexual experiences.”
Unbuckling the Bible Belt: A State-Level Analysis of Religious Factors and Google Searches for Porn.
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