Researchers Find Link Between Winning Elections And Online Porn

A husband and wife research team may have discovered a novel way to make college kids care about politics. According to their research, online porn usage goes up in states that voted for winning candidates after elections.

The researchers, Patrick Markey and Charlotte Markey, associate professors of psychology at Villanova University and Rutgers University, respectively, published their results in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. What has looking at online porn after elections got to do with evolution, you ask?

The researchers were actually trying to test the idea that testosterone levels rise after a male has won a fight or challenge, and fall after he has lost. To see if it might be true in the political arena, the duo looked at Google Trends to track the frequency of search words commonly associated with porn in the time frame right after the 2004, 2006 and 2008 U.S. elections.

According to the research abstract posted on the Journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, “Consistent with the Challenge Hypothesis, following all three election cycles, individuals located in states voting for the winning political party tended to search for pornography keywords relatively more often than individuals residing in states voting for the losing political party.”

Read more about the research here.