Abstract
Research regarding Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder (CSBD) has expanded rapidly, yet controversy remains concerning the role of moral evaluations in shaping perceptions of behavioral addiction. This study evaluated the longitudinal relationships between moral disapproval of pornography, pornography use frequency, and problematic pornography use (PPU) at both between-person and within-person levels. Data were collected over five waves (two years) from a large community sample of American adults (N = 4,363); analyses were restricted to those who contributed at least one active-use wave (N = 7,512 person-waves from 2,903 individuals). Using a Multi-Level Modeling approach, results at the between-person level indicated that moral disapproval was negatively associated with use frequency but positively associated with PPU, and that the interaction of disapproval and frequency was a significant predictor of PPU. At the within person level, we did not find evidence for a purely within-person effect of moral incongruence (e.g., state pornography viewing frequency and disapproval did not interact to predict PPU), but we did find clear evidence for a cross-level interaction. Trait moral disapproval interacts with within-person, within-timepoint deviations in pornography use frequency to predict greater levels of PPU. Collectively, these findings suggest that while moral disapproval may serve as a population-level barrier to pornography use, it functions as a specific risk factor for self-reported feelings of addiction among individuals who use pornography, particularly during periods when they experience relatively higher levels of use. Our results also underscore that behavioral frequency is an insufficient metric for assessing sexual dysregulation and must be interpreted within the context of an individual’s moral evaluations. Clinically, these findings emphasize the necessity of diagnostic precision to differentiate moral incongruence from genuine behavioral dysregulation in the assessment and treatment of CSBD and PPU.