Published on
Updated
Reading 3 mins.
After a few drinks, are you attracted to people who wouldn’t usually have caught your eye? This effect of alcohol called “Beer Googles” has been studied by researchers and their conclusions are amazing!
After two or more drinks, you may feel attracted to people you wouldn’t normally notice. Fueled by difficult awakenings and more or less true anecdotes, the idea that alcohol makes others more beautiful is quite widespread. But California researchers wanted to know if this legend was confirmed by science.
Previous research typically asked participants to simply rate the attractiveness of others when sober and intoxicated, based on photos. But this new study adds a more realistic element: the promise to meet the people assessed.
Simulate a drinking environment
To conduct the research, researcher Molly A. Bowdring of the Stanford Prevention Research Center in Palo Alto, California and her thesis supervisor Prof. Michael Sayette brought 18 pairs of male friends in their twenties to the lab to assess the attractiveness of the people they looked at in photos and videos. The fact of selecting pairs aimed to better simulate the context of consumption between friends/colleagues. Participants were informed that they would have the opportunity to interact with one of these people in a future experiment. After providing attractiveness ratings, they were asked to select the ones they would most like to interact with.
These pairs of men returned to the lab twice. On the first experience, both men were given alcohol (up to approximately 0.08% BAC, the legal limit for driving in the United States) and on the other occasion they were both received a soft drink. To best simulate drinking environments, the researchers brought friends together in the lab to mimic the social interactions that would typically take place in a real drinking situation.
More “liquid courage” than “beer goggles”
Result: the researchers found no confirmation of these “beer googles”. Whether or not participants were intoxicated had no effect on how they rated the attractiveness of others. However, drinking alcohol increased the likelihood that men would want to interact with people they had found attractive.
When they drank alcohol, they were 1.71 times more likely to select one of their four most attractive candidates to potentially meet them in a future study, compared to when they were sober.
According to the researchers, alcohol does not alter the perception of others, but rather boosts self-confidence, giving men the courage to want to meet those they find most attractive, which they may be very much. less likely to do otherwise.
Beware of the disinhibiting effects of alcohol!
These results are in agreement with a previous study on this phenomenon. She had reported that alcohol molecules deposit on receptors in the frontal lobes that manage our decision-making. Put on standby, this brain region could no longer fulfill its role of controlling our sexual urges. Here again, alcohol would not change our way of seeing the people around us but would release our desire.
This disinhibition could encourage risky behaviors (unprotected intercourse in particular). For the researchers, these results could be useful for therapists and patients. “People who consume alcohol would do well to realize that this beneficial short-term effect is potentially harmful to long-term health.“says Molly Bowdring.
One can nevertheless question the relevance of the methodology of these studies. On the one hand, the consumption of alcohol remains limited and unique (which is not necessarily the norm during a festive evening…). On the other hand, the promise to interact with someone at a future meeting remains declarative and not necessarily demonstrated in practice…