On Sunday nights, I play saxophone in the backing band for a
blues jam that is held at a local club.
Most of the people who come are musicians or other folks from the
neighborhood who wandered in for a drink.
As I look around the room, most people have a drink in front of
them. They are talking and
laughing. Everybody seems to be having a
good time.
Of course, there is a lot going on there. The music adds to the atmosphere. Many of the people who are there know each
other, and so they are continuing conversations that have been going on for
weeks (if not years).
What role does alcohol play in this?
This question was addressed in a paper by Michael Sayette
and 8 of his colleagues in paper in the August, 2012 issue of Psychological Science. They did a fascinating and well-designed
study of the influence of alcohol on social interactions.
A total of 720 people participated in this research. One set of participants drank about 3 drinks
over a 30 minute period. The drinks were
a mixture of vodka and cranberry juice.
The second set drank 3 placebo drinks.
The placebo was a mixture of flat soda and cranberry juice. Before participants entered the lab, though,
the glasses were wiped with vodka to give them an alcohol taste. The third set drank cranberry juice and was
told that they were given no alcohol. The reasoning behind these three groups
is that it helps to distinguish between the effects of alcohol and the effects
about the belief that you are drinking.
Participants came to the lab in groups of three. The experimenters ensured that the group
members had never met before.
Participants sat around a table to consumer their drinks. They thought that the purpose of the study
was to test the effects of alcohol on other tasks that they would do later, but
the experimenters were really interested in the interactions among people as
they drank and how that affected how much the group members got along with each
other.
After finishing their drinks, the group members filled out
evaluations of how much they liked the other members of their group.
What happened?
First, the manipulations of the drinks worked as
expected. Participants in the alcohol
condition had the highest blood alcohol levels (about .06 by the end of the
study). The other two sets of
participants had very low blood alcohol levels.
Second, both the alcohol and placebo participants rated themselves as
feeling somewhat intoxicated, though the participants who drank alcohol rated
themselves as much more intoxicated than those in the placebo group. Consistent with that, the alcohol participants
estimated that they drank about 7 ounces of alcohol, while the placebo participants
estimated that they drank about 4.5 ounces of alcohol.
Overall, the people who drank alcohol rated that they got
along better with their group members than either the people who drank the
placebo or the non-alcoholic drinks. The
difference between those who drank alcohol and those who drank the placebo was
particularly large.
Why did this happen?
The researchers did a painstaking analysis of the facial
expressions of the group members and the speech patterns. The groups that drank alcohol smiled more and
gave fewer signs of negative feeling than the other groups. So, on a moment-by-moment basis, the groups
that drank alcohol seemed to be having a better time than the other groups.
In addition, everyone in the groups that drank alcohol
seemed to participate in the conversations to a greater degree than the people
in the other groups. In the groups that
drank alcohol, there were more conversations in which each person took a turn
speaking.
Putting all of this together, then, a moderate amount of
drinking gets people to participate in social interactions and to enjoy those
social interactions. In that way,
alcohol helps people to get along well with others. This seems to be an effect of the alcohol
itself, and not just the belief that you are having alcoholic drinks with other
people, because the results of the placebo condition were similar to those of
the control condition.