Participants
Participants were psychology undergraduate students at a university in Malaysia. An a priori power analysis using the Eligibility criteria for participation included: (1) being at least 18 years old and (2) being a regular pornography user, operationally defined here as having watched pornography at least three times a week in the 4 weeks leading up to the study start date. While this definition of “regular” pornography use is arbitrary, it was reasoned that this minimum frequency was needed for a 7-day abstinence period to represent a significant enough deprivation of participants’ weekly pornography use habits to be able to induce potential withdrawal symptoms. A custom definition of pornography adapted and modified from definitions found in the past literature (Grubbs et al., A total of 184 students signed up for the study and were assessed for eligibility through their responses to questions on the baseline survey. Eight participants were excluded at this stage because they did not meet the requirement of being a regular pornography user. A total of 176 participants were randomized, resulting in 86 participants allocated to the abstinence group and 90 participants allocated to the control group. No participants failed to complete any daily survey post-randomization (144 completed all seven surveys, 23 completed six surveys, six completed five surveys, two completed four surveys, and one completed three surveys). Daily survey completion rate across the 7 days ranged from 92.2% to 100.0%. An intention-to-treat strategy (Gupta, CONSORT flow diagramBaseline characteristics of the sample are presented in Table S1 in Supplementary Material. At baseline, 48.9% of participants reported desire to reduce but not completely quit their pornography use, 40.9% of participants reported no desire to reduce nor quit their pornography use, and 10.2% reported desire to completely quit their pornography use. In line with CONSORT best practice recommendations for RCTs (Altman et al., It is important to highlight that Malaysia, where the present study was conducted, is a sexually conservative country with restrictive laws regulating pornography use (e.g., access to pornographic websites is blocked by the government) and with religious and cultural values that may influence perception of pornography use as immoral or a sin (Goh et al., 