Betting on Digital Attention: Pornography vs. Climate, Economics, Elections, Immigration, and War (Don’t Take the Field)

Media effects research has exploded across the social and behavioral sciences in recent years. Flagship psychology, sociology, political science, public health, and medical journals now regularly feature media effects scholarship, for example. This scholarly explosion has not included pornography effects research, however, which continues to overwhelmingly appear in specialty journals. This critical essay uses Google Trends data to buttress the argument that pornography is a massively popular media genre deserved of focal social and behavioral science research attention for a large number of pragmatic and theoretical reasons.