Study dispels myth of other people’s ‘alcohol attraction’

American research casts doubt on anecdotal evidence about the “influence” of drinking on the perception of the appearance of the opposite sex, but suggests that drinking alcohol can give “courage” to hit on attractive people, writes The Guardian.

Scientists have debunked the existence of “beer glasses”: the idea that alcohol makes other people more attractive. However, studies show that drinking can give you the “liquid courage” to approach attractive people.

The term “beer glasses” is said to have been coined by male students at North American University in the 1980s. However, despite anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon, the relationship between alcohol intoxication and physical attraction has not been systematically studied.

Previous research, in which people were typically asked to rate other people’s attractiveness by rating pictures of themselves while sober and drunk, had mixed results. Taken together, these studies show that if the “beer glasses effect” existed, it was small, said Professor Molly Bowdring of the Stanford Prevention Research Center in Palo Alto, Calif., who led the latest study.

The new study has added an extra dimension: the chance to actually meet some of the people participants had previously rated.

“By making participants believe that the photographs they were viewing were of people they might interact with in the future, the research team added a pleasing element of realism that had been lacking in previous research in the field,” says Rebecca Monk, professor of psychology at the University of Edge Hill. “Their paradigm also allows us to explore the adage of ‘liquid courage’, and not just the phenomenon of so-called beer glasses.”

Molly Bowdring and Professor Michael Sayett of the University of Pittsburgh invited 18 pairs of male friends to the lab to rate the attractiveness of the men and women they saw in photographs and videos. The reasons for inviting pairs of friends were to try and mimic the social interactions that would normally occur in a real drinking situation.

In one case, both men were given enough vodka and cranberry juice to raise their blood alcohol concentration to about 0.08% – the legal limit for driving in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and many US states – and in another they were both given soft drink.

After providing ratings for the attractiveness of the photographs, they were asked to choose which of these people they would most like to interact with in a future experiment.

A study published in the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Research did not show that alcohol increases people’s perception of other people’s attractiveness. “But what we did find was that people were more likely to choose to hang out with the people they found most attractive after drinking alcohol,” Bowdring explains.

Indeed, participants who were drunk were 1.71 times more likely to choose one of their four most attractive candidates for a potential date in a future study compared to when they were sober.

“Their results essentially suggest that while drunkenness may not have resulted in ‘beer glasses’, it did seem to increase boldness in the sense that people were more likely to want to interact with attractive people. people,” says Monk, whose previous study found some evidence to support the “beer glasses” effect.

In this study, British students were asked to complete a computer task ignoring pictures of attractive and unattractive faces. It found that while sober participants were more distracted by attractive faces, those who were “lightly drunk” were equally distracted by attractive and less attractive faces.

Monk adds that different methodological approaches may explain some of these mixed results; to move forward, larger studies are needed in this area to see if they can be replicated.

According to Rebecca Monk, given the effect of alcohol on visual processing and cognitive function, it is also possible that the results will change with increased levels of intoxication.

Assuming that alcohol does increase a person’s likelihood of interacting with someone they find attractive, Bowdring thinks her results may reveal one process underlying the beneficial but potentially harmful nature of alcohol, including its effect on risky sexual behavior.

“If you’re going to drink alcohol, I think it’s worth thinking about how you can do it in a safe way that suits your goals,” she said. “People may benefit by realizing that valuable social motivations and intentions are changed during alcohol consumption in ways that may be attractive in the short term, but possibly harmful in the long term.”