Torch wood
We now have solid scientific evidence that people have no way of determining how drunk they are when they drink in a group. A team of social scientists recently completed a study of bar and club hoppers in Cardiff, Wales and found that most had an incredibly imprecise idea of their drunkenness and the dangers of drinking. But the researchers also learned something unobvious and intriguing How people estimate their level of intoxication.
In a BMC Public Health paper, the researchers write that they wanted to know “how people rate their intoxication and the health consequences of their drinking while intoxicated in social drinking settings.” So they spent several months visiting four different party areas in Cardiff between 8pm and 3am on Friday and Saturday nights. These neighborhoods had, as the researchers put it, “a high density of properties licensed for the sale and consumption of alcohol on site.” To get a broad sample of barhoppers, researchers approached every seventh person they saw and asked them to participate in the study. The idea was to try to get people who dated from different social groups, because the researchers were interested in how peers influenced people’s subjective perception of drunkenness.
Once a Cardiff drinker agreed to take part, the researchers conducted a blood alcohol test to determine their actual level of drunkenness. They then asked the drinker a series of four questions:
1) How drunk are you right now, on a scale of 1 (completely sober) to 10 (completely drunk)?
2) How extreme has your drinking been tonight, on a scale of 1 (not at all) to 10 (extremely)?”
3) If you drank as much every week as you did tonight, how likely is it that you will harm your health in the next 15 years, on a scale of 1 (definitely not) to 10 (definitely)?
4) If you drank as much every week as you did tonight, how likely are you to get cirrhosis of the liver in the next 15 years, on a scale of 1 (definitely not) to 10 (definitely)?
As amusing as it is to imagine clubbers being accosted by scientists at 2am with this list of vaguely terrifying questions, the results were anything but a joke. By comparing subjective reports of drunkenness with actual blood alcohol test results, the researchers found that people were measuring their drunkenness and health risks on a ranked scale. “People in drinking environments make decisions to drink more based on their observation of those around them,” they write.
The researchers speculate that this strange phenomenon could actually be part of humanity’s evolutionary penchant for thinking in terms of rank. “Such rank sensitivity may also explain why drinking is on the rise in a society. If everyone drank an additional 10 units per week, no one would think they were more at risk for an alcohol-related disorder since their rank positions would remain the same,” they say. she. to write. Simply put, people rated how drunk they were relative to their peers. If everyone around him was blackout drunk, an extremely drunk person would consider himself relatively sober. But in the same way, a tipsy person with sober people was well aware that he was loaded.
After a thorough statistical analysis, the researchers found that people based their rank sensitivity not on the most drunk people around them, but on the most sober people. “It seems that drinkers are more aware of their own level of intoxication when they are in the presence of people who are sober,” they conclude. As a result, we may be able to curb dangerous drinking by encouraging the presence of ‘sober ambassadors’, such as designated drivers in bars and clubs. Our social groups determine how much we drink, but they often push us in a healthier direction than we realize.
Cardiff University social scientist Simon Moore, an author of the study, noted in a release that “either we could work to reduce the number of very drunk people in a drinking environment, or we could increase the number of people who are sober. Our theory predicts that the latter approach would have the greatest impact.”
BMC Public Health2016. DOI: 10.1186/s12889-016-3469-z