Unhooked
Porn addiction test
This is the PPCS-6: six questions, published in 2021 by Beáta Bőthe and colleagues after testing on more than 16,000 people. You answer here, your browser adds the six numbers, and you see the total against the cut-off the paper itself recommends: twenty, out of a range of six to forty-two.
What it can tell you: whether your answers fall above or below the line that best separated 266 people who had sought treatment for problematic pornography use from 698 people who had not. What it cannot tell you: whether you have a disorder. The authors say so themselves — a self-report scale is the first step of a screening, and a clinical interview is the step after it.
It takes about a minute. There is no email box at the end of it, no clock running against you, and no page that tells you your brain is broken and then sells you the repair.
The six questions
The scale is administered with the definition the study used: “Pornography is defined as material (text, picture, video, etc.) that (1) creates or elicits sexual feelings or thoughts and (2) contains explicit exposure or descriptions of sexual acts involving the genitals, such as vaginal or anal intercourse, oral sex, or masturbation.”
Think back to the past six months and mark, on the seven-point scale, how often or to what extent each statement applies to you. There is no right or wrong answer.
Answer all six, then score it.
A screening signal, not a diagnosis.
Bőthe, B., Tóth-Király, I., Demetrovics, Z., & Orosz, G. (2021). The Short Version of the Problematic Pornography Consumption Scale (PPCS-6): A Reliable and Valid Measure in General and Treatment-Seeking Populations. The Journal of Sex Research, 58(3), 342–352. doi:10.1080/00224499.2020.1716205. Items, anchors and cut-off from Appendix 1 of the authors’ published copy of the scale, which their laboratory offers free of charge for research or practice.
How the score is worked out
Six items, each answered on a seven-point scale from 1 to 7, added together with no weighting of any kind. So the total runs from 6 to 42, and the line the paper draws is 20: at or above it your answers look more like those of the people in the study who had sought help, and below it more like the people who had not. There is no arithmetic here beyond that sum, and none of the six items counts for more than another.
Those numbers describe a specific comparison and it is worth knowing which one. The cut-off was set to separate 266 people who had sought treatment for problematic pornography use from 698 people who had not. At 20 the paper reports 84% sensitivity, 90% specificity and 89% overall accuracy against that status. The other side of the same figures: about a quarter of the people scoring 20 or more in that study had not sought treatment, and about 6% of those scoring 19 or less had. It is a good screen. It is not a scan, and the line was drawn to sort a sample rather than to describe you.
The six items, the seven anchor words, the six-month recall window and the cut-off are reproduced character for character from Appendix 1 of the authors’ own published copy of the scale. That is not tidiness for its own sake: the cut-off of 20 describes those six sentences and no others, so rewording an item would leave the number on the screen measuring nothing while still looking exactly as authoritative.
Scoring happens in this page: the six numbers added, the total set against twenty. This tool keeps no state, so closing the tab clears the answers and there is nothing to come back to.
Questions people ask
Is this porn addiction test a diagnosis?
No. The PPCS-6 is a screening questionnaire, and its authors write plainly that a self-report scale can only be the first step of a screening, followed by a clinical interview. There is also no such diagnosis to hand out: the World Health Organization's ICD-11 lists compulsive sexual behaviour disorder, and problematic pornography use is discussed under that heading. This page uses the phrase people search for, and makes no claim with it.
How accurate is the PPCS-6?
At a cut-off of 20 the paper reports 84% sensitivity, 90% specificity and 89% overall accuracy against treatment-seeking status. Read the other side of those numbers too: in that study about a quarter of the people scoring 20 or more had not sought treatment, and about 6% of those scoring 19 or less had. It is a good screen. It is not a scan.
What does my score mean?
Six items scored 1 to 7, so the total runs from 6 to 42, and the paper puts the line at 20. At or above it, your answers look more like those of the people in the study who had sought help for problematic pornography use; below it, more like the people who had not. The line was drawn to sort a sample, not to describe you.
What should I do next?
Small moves, in this order. Learn something to do in the ten minutes that count: the urge surfing timer explains the technique and paces two minutes of it. Find out what tends to change at each milestone on the recovery timeline, where every line is either cited or labelled as reported experience. And if you want the count and the tools on your phone, that is what Unhooked is.
Further reading
- Is it a real disorder? What ICD-11 and the DSM-5 actually did with the label, and why the word matters less than the log.
- Why you feel terrible after watching porn The best-evidenced finding in this field: distress tracks how much you disapprove of your own use more than it tracks the use itself. What that means.
- Therapy for compulsive porn use: what works Therapy-grade methods measurably reduce problematic pornography use — the CBT and ACT family, per a 2025 meta-analysis. What sessions involve, when to go.