Buzz kill
Alcohol isn’t necessarily making you as happy, horny, and indecorous as you think it is
REGAN SARMATIUK VOLUNTEER STAFF
PHOTO: DAVID LIPNOWSKI
It’s horribly clichéd, but true nonetheless: university students are ardent drinkers, at least statistically speaking. There are a lot of figures out there, but a 2005 study revealed that 68 per cent of American college students reported drinking in the last month, and 42 per cent of those students admitted to binge drinking, which is typically defined as consuming five or more drinks in a short amount of time. A 2002 study comparing Canadian and American college-student drinking patterns found that American students tend to binge slightly more often, while Canadian students, not to be outdone, tend to drink more overall (oh, Canada).
So it isn’t too terribly difficult to find someone with a killer “I was so drunk I ______” story on a university campus. I tried it last week, and a quick little jaunt up to Wise Guys On Campus produced a couple of colourful stories. One involved a late-night drunken ramble through the streets, complete with kitchen-pot hats and relay races, while the other featured a rude, early-morning awakening in a restaurant with no recollection of the chain of events leading up to said awakening.
The blank could be filled in with any number of versions of the story, but the point is the same, regardless of the specifics: drinking, especially in college-aged kids, leads to all kinds of behaviour that wouldn’t be engaged in outside the context of that Freudian state of “toxic satisfaction.”
However, while the “alcohol made me do it” card has been played countless times throughout human history — from Noah of ancient Ark fame to Mel and Britney today — there is a whole body of psychological research out there that calls the validity of this drunken “wild card” into question.
I recently spoke with two bartenders of very different stripes who have each been observing drunken human behaviour for a considerable number of years. Although these two men approach the issue with entirely different methodologies, their conclusions are fundamentally similar.
In the ‘lab’
Alan Marlatt is a Canadian expat psychology professor who did a rare thing circa 1981: he opened a bar on a U.S. college campus. The bar, a part of the University of Washington’s Addictive Behaviors Research Center, is called a “Behavioral Alcohol Research Lab,” or fittingly, a “BARLAB.” It simulates a normal cocktail lounge, and as one of the first two of its kind in the country at the time, its purpose was to serve a tool for behavioural research on issues surrounding alcohol consumption.
It might be easy for a Canadian to take the existence of an on-campus bar for granted, but because those prohibitive Americans have traditionally had an odd and quasi-puritanical relationship with alcohol, a fair bit of controversy ensued over the construction of Marlatt’s bar. A media circus ensued and the public funding for the lab was threatened, largely due to misperceptions of its purpose — apparently, some taxpaying Americans weren’t thrilled with the idea of their money being used to buy students “free drinks.”
It took some time, but once the initial controversy passed, Marlatt got down to business. He served as “chief bartender” at the BARLAB, presiding over a series of about 50 pioneering studies that explored the effects that drinking alcohol has on social interactions, mood, physical state, and issues surrounding sexuality. He and his colleagues made a highly significant contribution to their field with the invention of a creative new approach to their research called the Balanced Placebo Design, inspired by the placebo trials that a new pharmacological drug typically undergoes.
There are four test groups in the design: the first group expects to receive alcohol during their visit to the BARLAB and does in fact receive it, while the second group expects alcohol but receives a “virgin” drink (whether non-alcoholic beer, or vodka and tonic sans the vodka). The third group receives alcohol but thinks they’re drinking a non-alcoholic beverage, and the fourth group expects a virgin drink and gets a virgin drink.
The results are intriguing, to say the least — so much so that PBS’s Bill Nye the Science Guy even decided to stop by Marlatt’s bar last year to check things out.
While there are undeniable biological effects to drinking alcohol, Marlatt discovered that a portion of traditional drunken behaviour is purely psychological.
“The main thing that determines people’s behaviour [in the BARLAB] is what they think they’re getting,” explained Marlatt, using the Bill Nye example to illustrate.
For Nye’s visit, a group of seven male and seven female students were recruited from Greek houses on campus. This group of “experienced drinkers,” under the impression that they were receiving real beer, were told to drink freely and be themselves, and that Nye would be observing them for one hour behind the lab’s one-way mirror. Little did they know, they were actually drinking a non-alcoholic dark German ale. Each of them drank about a pitcher.
“Over the course of the hour . . . they just got more and more into a party atmosphere,” recalled Marlatt.
“People were louder, they were flirting, they were standing up and fealing dizzy and reporting all those effects that you would normally get if drinking a real pitcher of beer.”
When Nye emerged from the observation room, the students told him they were feeling “relaxed” and “loaded,” until the Science Guy dropped the bomb. The group’s first response was one of disbelief.
“We had to explain to them that the reason why they were feeling intoxicated had a lot to do with classical conditioning,” said Marlatt.
Like Pavlov’s dogs, these frat boys and sorority girls had salivated in the bar-like setting at the beer-like stimuli in accordance with the way their previous drinking experiences and beliefs had conditioned them to respond.
This “conditioned response” to alcohol is evident in all sorts of contexts. In one balanced-placebo study conducted at the University of Washington, men were exposed to pornography, and their response (or “erotic penile tumescence”) was measured. There was no difference between the people who received alcohol and those who didn’t — the men all got equally “turned on.”
The principle of “expectancy effects” carries over to still more areas. If you expect to become more aggressive when drinking, you will become more aggressive. If you expect to feel less stressed after knocking back a few, you will likely experience real feelings of greater relaxation, whether you’re consuming alcohol or a placebo. All of this then raises the climactic question: am I doing it because I’m drunk, or am I getting drunk so I can do it?
“I think some people use alcohol so that if things don’t work out, they can say: ‘well, I was drinking, I wouldn’t normally do that,’” said Marlatt.
“We’re interested in [studying the way] people use drinking as an excuse for various kinds of outcomes.”
In the ‘field’
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Shane, an 11-year veteran bartender with keen observational skills, concurs with Marlatt: “I’ve seen people at the end of the night — people who we have almost had to cut off — in the parking lot or at McDonald’s or something like that, and they’re stone-cold sober. They’ve just been pretending to be drunk to have an excuse if anything bad happens, or in case they do anything embarrassing or offensive, they can have something to blame it on.”
Shane works at Monty’s Bar One, and its location just off campus has always ensured a steady stream of university patrons. Over the years, he has intuitively picked up on the principle inherent in the BARLAB experiments — that expectations and setting can tremendously affect behaviour.
“From my experience . . . when people walk into a bar environment, or even a party environment, they pretend they’re in a movie. Their alter-ego comes out of them, and they’re not really who they are. They try to portray someone else’s image,” he said.
He stressed the importance of being careful about forming hasty judgments, and indicated that not everyone succumbs to the “smoke and mirrors” of the bar. Still, though, he insisted that the prime reason people alter their image at the bar is for the sake of hooking up. They are unwittingly transparent about it, too.
“We’ll have bets behind the bar on who will take home that chick, or how many girls will say ‘fuck you’ to that one guy.”
He also noted that, generally speaking, girls these days are increasingly more “obscene, up-front, and to-the-point” than guys. He himself has been propositioned countless times, and has heard a myriad of pickup lines, from the obscene to the downright cheesy: “my place or your place?”
Sobering up
But beyond the cheesy pick-up lines and amusing observations, Shane has also seen first-hand many of the serious consequences that can accompany binge drinking. He knew Kris Howard, the U of M student who disappeared after a night of $1.25 shots and heavy drinking at Monty’s in September of 2000, only to be found dead in the Red River a few weeks later. He also witnessed the deadly June 2005 shooting of his friend, Miguel Munoz, right outside of Monty’s, something that will affect him for the rest of his life.
It is well-documented that binge drinking in college students can lead to unintentional injury, poor academic performance, violence, sexual assault, legal difficulties and so on. It is for this reason that researchers such as Marlatt continue to advocate and search for effective ways to curtail the harmful consequences of high-risk drinking in university students.
Interestingly enough, Marlatt has observed that students who go through an experience similar to that of the aforementioned fraternity and sorority students tend to re-think their beliefs about alcohol and reduce their levels of consumption over the next few months. The rude awakening makes them less likely to blame it on the booze.
“Somehow, going through it and realizing that they can be feeling under the influence even though there’s no alcohol there makes them less psychologically dependent on alcohol.
“They can drink less and still have good effects.”
