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What happens when you get drunk?
Malcolm Gladwell presents a hypothesis which I hadn't heard before:
Put a stressed-out drinker in front of an exciting football game and he’ll forget his troubles. But put him in a quiet bar somewhere, all by himself and he’ll grow mare anxious. Alcohol's principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental field of vision.
It causes, “a state of short- sightedness in which superficially understood, immediate aspects of experience have a disproportionate influence on behavior and emotion." Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the in the background disappear. That’s why drinking makes you think you are attractive when the world thinks otherwise: the alcohol removes the little constraining voice from the outside world that normally keeps our self-assessments in check. Drinking relaxes the man watching football because the game is front and center, and alcohol makes every secondary consideration fade away. But in a quiet bar his problems are front and center and every potentially comforting or mitigating thought recedes. Drunkenness is not disinhibition. Drunkenness is myopia.
The gated link is here. One of the associated researchers with this point -- Claude Steele -- is the twin brother of Shelby Steele. Robert Josephs has done some of the related work with Steele. You can buy their core piece for $11.95. Here is an interesting piece by Steele on how "drinking away your troubles" works. Here is a very useful survey piece by Josephs (and others) on the "alcohol myopia" hypothesis.
Here is an hour-long interview with Steele (which I have not heard). Steele is now Provost at Columbia University.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on February 14, 2010 at 07:13 AM in Food and Drink, Science | Permalink
Comments
I'm a teatotaller, so this is spectator-sport stuff, but one thought that strikes me is that this is an alternative explanation for the greater tendency toward alcoholism among people with ADD. The standard explanation centers around the documented link between ADD and Reward Deficiency Syndrome, and that makes sense too, but I could totally see self-medicating on something that narrows one's focus to what's immediately in front of one.
Posted by: Jim Henley at Feb 14, 2010 9:47:29 AM
Black label in winter time.
Kettle One in summer time.
HC
Posted by: Happy Camper at Feb 14, 2010 11:07:43 AM
Once again, Gladwell is clueless. I wonder if Gladwell has ever drank a beer in a bar. Drunkennes can cause long-sightedness and nostalgia. Myopia would be a better description of the effects of marijuana.
Think about it. If the "Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the background disappear" then why are drunk drivers a problem? Because it is just the reverse: the drunk problem driver is lost in background emotional thought and not paying attention to the foreground.
Posted by: Bock at Feb 14, 2010 11:19:26 AM
Did they control for personality effects? Specifically, I imagine that people at ends of the introversion/extroversion spectrum may react completely differently to alcohol while sitting in a bar. Haven't we all seen this?
Posted by: D at Feb 14, 2010 11:46:29 AM
are you somehow professionally bound to take malcolm gladwell seriously?
Posted by: babar at Feb 14, 2010 12:49:50 PM
I sometimes wonder what it must be like to be willing to confidently assert things on the basis of the most tenuous evidence.
Posted by: M at Feb 14, 2010 1:09:34 PM
Does that mean soberness is not inhibition, soberness is distraction (not of a focused variety but of an unfocused scattered one)? Focus is less pejorative than myopic, and I don't think short sighted and reflective are consistent.
Posted by: Lord at Feb 14, 2010 1:29:51 PM
God, some people are so puritan about drink. Just have a glass or two of wine with dinner whenever you fancy, make sure that your children have the occasional sip - well diluted to begin with - and stop fretting. "Alcohol's principal effect" is NOT to narrow our emotional and mental field of vision, it is to add to the social joys. It is your duty to your children to innoculate them against the view that the point of drinking is to get drunk. And tell your fellowcountrymen to bloody grow up. That especially.
Posted by: dearieme at Feb 14, 2010 2:38:49 PM
Babar,
Maybe Tyler was drunk.
Posted by: Yancey Ward at Feb 14, 2010 3:02:26 PM
Just because Malcolm Gladwell believes it doesn't mean it's wrong.
Posted by: LemmusLemmus at Feb 14, 2010 3:22:38 PM
"Just because Malcolm Gladwell believes it doesn't mean it's wrong."
Yeah, OK. But seems like you'd trust the drunks themselves to have more insight on this one.
Posted by: Bock at Feb 14, 2010 4:12:45 PM
Sure, this effect is well known among programmers, though not to the extent of drunkenness: It's much easier to write good code after a drink or two than it is sober or after three or four drinks. There's an XKCD comic on the subject, but I can't find it at the moment.
Posted by: John Murphy at Feb 14, 2010 4:52:42 PM
XKCD: The Ballmer Peak. http://xkcd.com/323/
"...somehow a BAC between 0.129% and 0.138% confers superhuman programming ability."
Posted by: Nick at Feb 14, 2010 6:54:39 PM
I wonder if Gladwell would suggest drinking before a long road trip. This would boost our confidence behind the wheel for sure.
Posted by: Keir at Feb 14, 2010 7:59:37 PM
This explains why my I think my best comments to this blog are made when I have a slight buzz from a scotch in the evening.
And, why, in the morning, the comments do not look so great.
And, why others must be permanantly buzzed.
Posted by: Bill at Feb 14, 2010 8:41:42 PM
I haven't drunk heavily enough to generate this effect in decades, and maybe it's only a young man's reaction, but I would get de facto tunnel vision where I couldn't notice much of anything on the periphery but everything in the center of my vision glowed luminously with great beauty. I felt like Vladimir Nabokov looking at a butterfly through a microscope.
I suspect this effect might have something to do with the high rate of alcoholism among writers, such as Fitzgerald, as they use alcohol to try to artificially revive the "lyric glow," the green light at the end of the dock that once shone so brightly for them when they were youths.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Feb 14, 2010 9:36:57 PM
yeah OK. unlike Sailer with his pretentious bs, I get drunk every night and am in fact very loaded right now.
Gladwell does make interesting and valid commentary on drinking in different cultures. But the comment in Tyler's quote above is more than retarded. Not as retarded as the Sailer fantasy of imagining himself Nabakov but nevertheless retarded.
Drunkeness telescopes time in the sense the long ago past present and future run together. the lonely among us, including me, are attracted to alcohol for that very reason. i am no longer lodged in the present.
Gladwell doesnt know shit albout drinking and as a drunk i have qualms with him presenting himself as an authority on the subject.
Posted by: Bock at Feb 15, 2010 1:31:31 AM
Hi,
The first noticeable effects of alcohol are the gradual release from many ordinary anxieties and tensions. Gradually you feel more carefree and social inhibitions become relaxed. As with any drug the actual effects of alcohol depend very much on expectations, the environment and how you feel. But common reactions are talkativeness, cheerfulness, contentment, and sociability...
Posted by: M3 real karte at Feb 15, 2010 7:52:03 AM
Think about it. If the "Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the background disappear" then why are drunk drivers a problem?
I think this only works as a refutation if alcohol only has the single cognitive effect Gladwell focuses on. If it also has other effects, including inflating confidence while impairing physical reflexes, which it seems to, then alcohol is still a problem for drivers. By analogy, Shakespeare joked about how alcohol makes men hornier but also makes it less likely that they can get it up. It doesn't do to say that because alcohol makes it harder for men to maintain an erection it can't possibly increase sexual arousal.
Posted by: Jim Henley at Feb 15, 2010 8:45:53 AM
"Drunkenness is not disinhibition. Drunkenness is myopia."
Is there some reason drunkenness can't result in BOTH disinhibition AND myopia?
Posted by: Gene Callahan at Feb 15, 2010 1:17:25 PM
This is one of the funniest comments thread I've read in awhile.
Posted by: Ben Casnocha at Feb 15, 2010 9:19:47 PM
Before I started the graduate courses I drank no single drop of alcohol.
I got a Masters degree now, and I pour an entire bottle of tequila (or vodka, or rum) every single friday. Learned that while I was in the graduate courses.
Going to the cantina (Mexican Saloon) drives my worries away and that's all I know.
Posted by: Ricardo at Feb 17, 2010 1:50:17 AM
I rarely grow anxious about female horses :) when drinking alone but I do forget my troubles for a while (drunk or sober) when presented with an exciting distraction.
Posted by: Billb at Feb 17, 2010 9:41:42 AM
Gladwell is such a ridiculous hack. Of all the people to become a "celebrity writer," why him?
Posted by: Erik at Feb 17, 2010 10:16:56 AM
Why is it necessary to qualify one's drinking status in order to have a comment on this topic taken seriously? Do we require medical researchers to take the drugs they are testing? Self-observation is not a strong trait for humans. This seems to be related to the fallacy in alternative medicine circles that you "can't knock it until you try it."
That being said, Malcolm Gladwell's opinion is greatly over-valued.
Posted by: the rugbyologist at Feb 19, 2010 6:22:21 AM
