Research Review

People Feel Social Benefits of Heavy Drinking Outweigh Harms

A study by University of Washington psychologists shows some people continue to drink heavily because of perceived positive effects, despite experiencing negative effects such as hangovers, fights, and regrettable sexual situations. The paper was published online in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors.

According to participants in the study, boosts of courage, chattiness, and other social benefits of drinking outweigh its harms, which they generally did not consider as strong deterrents. The findings offer a new direction for programs targeting binge drinking, which tend to limit their focus to avoiding alcohol’s ill effects rather than considering its rewards.

Nearly 500 college students completed an online survey measuring their drinking habits during the previous year. The survey assessed how often the participants had experienced 35 different negative consequences of drinking, such as blackouts, fights, hangovers, missed classes and work, and lost or stolen belongings, as well as 14 positive effects of drinking, including better conversational and joke-telling abilities, improved sexual encounters, and more energy to stay up late partying and dancing.

The researchers also measured the participants’ beliefs about how likely all of these drinking consequences would happen again and how positive or negative they were.

Participants rated the upsides to drinking as more positive and likely to happen in the future. “It’s as though they think that the good effects of drinking keep getting better and more likely to happen again,” says Diane Logan, lead author and a University of Washington clinical psychology graduate student.

Respondents’ perceptions of drinking’s negative consequences differed according to how many bad experiences they had had. Those who experienced a small to moderate number of ill effects of drinking considered the experiences to be not so bad and did not think that they were any more likely to experience them again compared with students who hadn’t experienced them.

The researchers call this cognitive-dissonance reasoning. It leads to people, on the morning after a night of heavy partying, telling themselves “I’ll never drink that much again” or “I threw up that one time, but that’s not me; I won’t do it again.” Or, it may be that once a bad consequence of drinking happens, people think that it wasn’t really as bad as they initially thought, the researchers speculated.

But the participants reporting the most bad experiences rated the episodes as more negative and more likely to happen again. “Until high levels of negative consequences are experienced, participants aren’t deterred by the ill effects of drinking,” Logan says.

The findings have implications for alcohol intervention programs for college students, which tend to focus on how to avoid the negative consequences of drinking. “We should take into account how people don’t think of negative consequences as all that bad or likely to happen again,” Logan says, adding that factoring in how people view alcohol’s positive effects “might have a bigger impact” on drinking habits.

— Source: University of Washington