The closest view I have ever had of a bar fight happened
when I was in grad school. The hockey
playoffs were going on, and a group of us when to a crowded sports bar to watch
a game. We were sitting at a table near
the bar. Late in the game, a group of
people was walking through the crowd when the goaltender made a great
save. In the cheering for the goalie’s
great reflexes, one of the people walking got pushed into someone standing at
the bar, knocking over the guy’s drink.
He probably didn’t need that next drink, because he turned and punched
the person who fell into him, and it took about 5 minutes to separate the two
of them after that.
In a normal situation, the drunk fan at the bar might have
realized that the person walking behind him did not intentionally fall into
him. In a crowded bar, people get
jostled. But after a few drinks, this
power of reasoning seems to have evaporated.
This issue was explored in a paper in the October, 2010
issue of Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin by Laurent Begue, Brad Bushman, Peter Giancola, Baptiste Subra,
and Evelyn Rosset.
The authors had men participate in a study in which they
evaluated some drinks and also performed some other judgments. Half of the men were told that the drinks
were going to have alcohol in them, and the other half were told that they
would not. Half of each of these groups
was assigned to have a drink that actually had alcohol in it while the other
had a drink with no alcohol. This design
allows the researchers to separate the effects of believing you are going to
drink from the effects of actually being drunk.
The men who drank alcohol were given enough to drink to get
their blood alcohol level to about 0.10%, which is the level at which many states
use to say that someone is driving drunk.
After the drinks, the men evaluated 50 sentences that
described actions. Critically, 20 of
these sentences described actions like “He deleted the email” that could be
done either intentionally or accidently.
The results of this study suggest that both your beliefs
about whether you are going to drink and your consumption of alcohol affect
your judgments of blame. People who
thought they were going to drink judged the same proportion of the sentences as
being intentional whether they drank alcohol or not. However, people who did not think they were
going to drink were far more likely to say that an action was intentional
rather than accidental when they had alcohol than when they did not.
This result suggests that both alcohol and beliefs about
drinking make you more likely to blame others for their actions rather than
recognizing the effects of the situation on people’s actions.
Before thinking a bit about what this result might mean, I
do want to express one frustration with this research paper. The overall pattern of data is pretty clear
that the effect of alcohol on blame depends on whether you think you are going
to drink. However, when the statistical
analysis was done, the overall difference between those who drank and those who
did not achieved the level of statistical reliability normally used for these
kinds of studies. The statistical
interaction between alcohol and beliefs about whether you are going to drink
missed that level of reliability by .02.
The authors treated this result as if the beliefs about drinking had no
effect on judgments. That is
unfortunate.
Ok, why do these results matter?
One effect of alcohol is that it can reduce your ability to
control your actions. You might never
get into a fistfight with someone under normal circumstances, but still end up
hitting them if you have had too much to drink.
If you combine that tendency with an increased tendency to want to blame
someone for their actions just by being in the environment in which alcohol is
present, then you can see why parties with alcohol can get out of control. This tendency may also make couples more
likely to fight if they have been drinking, because they may be more prone to
view actions taken by their partner as intentional.