Are Beer Goggles a Thing?
Imagine the scene. It’s early evening. You and your friends are in a bar. You’re just there to have a good time with your chums, but if you meet someone you find attractive, well, that would be a bonus. Looking around, though, you can’t spot anyone who seems like your type. Three hours and half a dozen sambucas later, and the bar is now packed to bursting with supermodels. Where did they all come from? Then, everything goes black and you wake up the next morning with a tongue like a cactus and body odour that would make a skunk blush. You roll over to find you’re sharing a futon with the winner of a Mr. Toad lookalike competition. Brilliant.
This is what you get for donning your beer goggles. Now, I wasn’t sure if ‘beer goggles’ was a term that I could expect every one of you to be familiar with. After all, when I lived in America a few years ago I was surprised to learn that nobody there had heard of ‘man flu’ and that using the word ‘fortnight’ made me sound like an accountant in a Charles Dickens novel. So I checked on Google Trends and it turns out that ‘beer goggles’ is common parlance across most of the English speaking world. Just so you know, those hard drinking Texans from San Antonio use the phrase most often. Anyway, for the benefit of my readers in Hungary and Romania, ‘beer goggles’ refers to the idea that when we drink alcohol, we find other people more attractive. We see them through the refracting lens of our beer goggles.
Scientists have known for over 10 years that this isn’t just an excuse for our dodgy drunken mistakes. It’s really true. But what they didn’t know until recently was whether beer goggles also work in reverse. That is, does drinking alcohol not only make us see other people as more attractive, but also make the drinker themselves more appealing?
To find out, Jana Van Den Abbeele and her colleagues at the University of Bristol in the UK brought 104 students into the lab and plied them with alcohol. Never let anyone tell you that you can’t have a blast in a psychology lab.
The volunteers were photographed before they drank anything. Then they were given an alcoholic drink that was calibrated to their body weight. Each volunteer drank 0.4g of alcohol for every kg they weighed. This low dose was equivalent to one 250ml (8.5 fl oz) glass of wine at 14% alcohol by volume for a person weighing 70kg or 154lb. After being photographed again, the volunteers had another drink and were photographed for a third and final time. Would they appear more attractive when they were sober, half cut, or completely blotto?
Van Den Abbeele found that there was an effect of alcohol on a person’s attractiveness. The volunteers were more appealing after the low dose of alcohol than when they were sober. But after the volunteers had drunk a second dose, the equivalent of half a litre of wine for a person of average bodyweight, a group of independent raters felt that they were more attractive when they were sober. There was no effect of sex, with both male and female volunteers experiencing a bump from the low dose and the opposite from a high dose.
It’s worth pointing out that the effects were not especially strong. When raters were given a choice between two photographs of the same person, one showing that person sober and another after a low dose of alcohol, they preferred the low dose photo only 54% of the time. When shown the sober and high dose photos, they preferred the sober photo 53% of the time. These differences are real, but they’re small. And we have no idea what happens when we drink even more. Is a small glass of wine the sweet spot and it’s all downhill from then on? Or does the negative effect of the high dose reverse when we drink even more alcohol?
There’s only one way to find out. *Slurp*. What? It’s Ribena, honest!
Van Den Abbeele, J., Penton-Voak, I. S. A., A. S., Stephen, I. D., & Munafò, M. R. (in press). Increased facial attractiveness following moderate, but not high, alcohol consumption. Alcohol and Alcoholism. Read summary
The content of this post first appeared in the 19 May 2015 episode of The Psychology of Attractiveness Podcast.
