Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beer Holder: People Who Think They Are Drunk Also Think They Are Attractive

Have you ever wanted to go up to that random cute stranger at a party but told your friends “I need more alcohol in my system first?” It’s an interesting topic to think about why we think we would need alcohol in order to feel ready to go up to a stranger. Bègue, Bushman, Zerhouni, Subra, and Ourabah (2012) wanted to study whether the consumption of alcohol influences our self-perceived attractiveness and conducted two separate studies. The first study was correlational in which they wanted to test the hypothesis that the more alcohol someone consumes the more attractive they believe themselves to be when they are drunk than when they are sober. In this study, there were nineteen participants and the setting was in a barroom. The participants volunteered to participate and basically, their procedure was to consume alcohol at first. There was no control of the blood alcohol level which led to the participants second task of having to breathe into a breathalyzer. Lastly, the participants had to rate how attractive, bright, and funny they felt at that point in time. Since this is a correlational study there are no independent or dependent variables. The psychologist then compared the ratings with the alcohol levels and the results showed the higher the blood alcohol volume the more attractive the participant rated themselves.

In the second study, the psychologists wanted to study their hypothesis experimentally. The study had eighty-six participants who were all brought into the study voluntarily through a newspaper ad. All of the participants were male and were getting paid twenty-one dollars an hour. It is also important to note that before the participants were allowed to join the study they were interviewed to make sure they were not allergic to anything that they would be drinking in the study and to make sure they were not at-risk drinkers. On the day of the study participants had to fast for at least three hours before and also had to sign a consent form. The independent variable known as the variable and experimenter manipulates in this study was the alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverage. The dependent variable or the variable that is being tested in this experiment is the measure of self-evaluated attractiveness in response to the alcohol level. The experimenters also explained that the design was a balanced placebo. During this balanced placebo design, half the subjects in each group were going to be told they are drinking an alcoholic drink while the other half in each group were told they are drinking a non-alcoholic drink but the experimenters actually are giving half of the participants an alcoholic drink and the other half a non-alcoholic drink. The participants were told they were taste-testing for a made-up company.

The procedure for this experiment was that the participants were randomly assigned to two groups. Each participant was given three glasses of either an alcoholic cocktail or a non-alcoholic cocktail. Then, they had ten minutes to drink all three of the drinks. The experimenters made sure to insert 2. 01 ounces of alcohol in order to reach the blood alcohol level of 0. 10 g/100ml. Next, the participants were asked to write down a message they thought would be useful to the made-up company for future advertising. In order to waste time for the alcohol to absorb the participants were asked to describe their drink and after 15 minutes they were asked to say what they thought up for an advertisement out loud in front of a female experimenter who was filming. Then the participants viewed their video of the advertisement and just like in the first study rated themselves on how attractive, bright, original, and funny they thought they were. To end the experiment participants were given food and when their blood alcohol level was fully lowered they were given a pre-debriefing. During the debriefing the experimenter asked the participants what they had drunk and if there was still any disbelief about the amount of alcohol in the drink those participants were discarded from the sample. After this, the participants had the real debriefing and then had to agree that their data could be used for research. The experimenters made sure the participants blood alcohol level was down to zero and then they were sent home. The experimenters wanted to get another measurement for the rating of attractiveness so they had 22 university students watch the filmed pretend advertisements for the bogus company that each participant did. The judges had to use the same scale as the participants and each of them rated every single participant on attractiveness. The judges were blind to what each participant had to drink. The experimenters used these judges to obtain an objective measure.

The results of the experiment were quite interesting. The experimenters discovered that the participants who were told they had alcohol in their drinks and believed it rated themselves higher in self-perceived attractiveness than those who were told they did not drink alcohol. They also found that the effect of the alcohol itself had nothing to do with it. What affected the participants was only the thought of them consuming the alcohol. From the judges rating results, the experimenters found that the judges ratings were close to the participants ratings whether they thought they were sober or drunk. This showed that although the people who thought they were drunk perceived themselves as attractive it did not have a significant effect on the way they were perceived by the judges.

Critique

I believe these two studies were great for discovering the truth to their hypothesis being that they wanted to discover if alcohol consumption influenced self-perceived attractiveness. The results were that “the boost in self-perceived attractiveness can be interpreted as a consequence of the activation of mental representations implicitly related to alcohol in long-term memory”. These results add support to the dual-process model of alcohol-related behavior by Moss and Albery (2009). In order for a study to be valid, it has to measure what it is supposed to measure. I believe the studies had validity because they were trying to find out whether alcohol consumption influenced how attractive people felt and they found out that alcohol consumption did not influence this but the mental processes associated with alcohol did. I also believe that the results from both studies are showing consistency because both studies although they were set up differently obtained the same results. This means that the studies show reliability. The researchers also showed appropriate safeguards because even though the participants were deceived in study number two they had a proper debriefing where the experimenter explained the process that happened in the study. The participants in study number one were also debriefed. In study one there are some factors that could’ve been influencing the results. Since the study was correlational there was no way of controlling how much alcohol was being consumed. This caused the psychologists to question whether maybe people who think they were attractive just drink more or that there is some other reason that could’ve influenced their perceived attractiveness. I also believe that this could’ve been true that is why I thought that study number 2 was a better way to test the hypothesis because they were allowed to test it in a more controlled setting. I agree with the way they set up study number 2 using the balanced placebo design and how they had extra measures in order to prevent suspicion which would have influenced the results. The only thing that I think might have influenced the results was the fact that there was a female filming the male participants when they were performing their advertisement for the made-up company. The reason I believe this could have influenced the results is because if the men thought the woman was attractive they could have tried to express themselves as more attractive, bright, original and funny maybe to impress the woman and the experimenters do not take this into consideration as influencing their results.

Brief Summary

The research presented in this journal was used to find out if alcohol consumption affected the way we perceive our attractiveness. The authors of this journal wanted to test their hypothesis where they believed that alcohol consumption made people perceive themselves as more attractive. Their results showed that it was the idea of alcohol that made-us associate ourselves as being more attractive but the actual alcohol consumption had no effect. The authors called this perceived attractiveness an “illusion”. In study number one 19 participants were studied in a barroom where they got to drink as much as they pleased and rated themselves on how attractive, bright, original, and funny they felt in the moment and had to breathe into a breathalyzer to measure their blood alcohol level. In study 2 the participants were randomly assigned to two different groups where half received alcohol and half did not. Half of each group were told they were receiving an alcoholic drink and the other half of each were told the drink contained no alcohol. The participants had 10 minutes to drink their drinks and then rate themselves. They also had to perform an advertisement for a made-up company and were filmed. These two studies concluded that alcohol-related expectancies increased self-perceived attractiveness.