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‘Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder’: People
who think they are drunk also think
they are attractive
Laurent Bègue1∗ , Brad J. Bushman2,3, Oulmann Zerhouni1,
Baptiste Subra4 and Medhi Ourabah5
1University of Grenoble 2, France
2The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA
3VU University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
4University of Paris Descartes, France
5University of Paris 8, Saint-Denis, France
This research examines the role of alcohol consumption on self-
perceived attractiveness.
Study 1, carried out in a barroom (N = 19), showed that the
more alcoholic drinks
customers consumed, the more attractive they thought they
were. In Study 2, 94 non-
student participants in a bogus taste-test study were given either
an alcoholic beverage
(target BAL [blood alcohol level] = 0.10 g/100 ml) or a non-
alcoholic beverage, with
half of each group believing they had consumed alcohol and
half believing they had
not (balanced placebo design). After consuming beverages, they
delivered a speech and
rated how attractive, bright, original, and funny they thought
they were. The speeches
were videotaped and rated by 22 independent judges. Results
showed that participants
who thought they had consumed alcohol gave themselves more
positive self-evaluations.
However, ratings from independent judges showed that this
boost in self-evaluation was
unrelated to actual performance.
‘Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder’
—Kinky Friedman
Alcohol has many consequences on social perception and
relationships. After a drink,
intoxicated people see members of the opposite sex through
‘beer goggles’, which makes
them look especially attractive (Jones, Jones, Thomas, & Piper,
2003; Lyvers, Cholakians,
Puorro, & Sundram, 2011; Neave, Tsang, & Heather, 2008). But
alcohol can also influence
self-perceptions. Previous research on alcohol and self-
awareness has found that alcohol
reduces self-awareness by inhibiting self-relevant encoding
processes (Hull, Levenson,
Young, & Sher, 1983). The purpose of the present research is to
test the hypothesis
∗Correspondence should be addressed to Laurent Bègue,
University of Grenoble 2, LIP, 1251, Av. Centrale, BP47, 38040
Grenoble, France (e-mail: [email protected]).
DOI:10.1111/j.2044-8295.2012.02114.x
British Journal of Psychology (2013), 104, 225–234
© 201 The British Psychological Society
www.wileyonlinelibrary.com
225
2
that alcohol consumption increases self-perceived
attractiveness. Whereas meta-analytic
reviews indicate that alcohol consumption enhances mood and
sexual arousal (Hull &
Bond, 1986), the link between alcohol consumption and self-
perceived attractiveness
remains to be clarified and theoretically developed.
In order to understand the link between alcohol and self-
processes, we relied
on the dual-process model of alcohol-related behaviour (Moss &
Albery, 2009; see
also Moss & Albery, 2010; Wiers & Stacy, 2010). This model
suggests that although
alcohol consumption disrupts cognitive controlled processes,
the mind may still become
‘intoxicated’ even in the absence of alcohol consumption (Moss
& Albery, 2009). For
example, when people believe that they are intoxicated, they
behave more aggressively
(Bègue et al., 2009), and show more sexually disinhibited
behaviours (Crowe & Georges,
1989). Various studies indicate that the effects of alcohol on
human cognition and
behaviour should distinguish pharmacological and social
psychological consequences
of alcohol consumption. In the field of sexual arousal, for
example, a meta-analytic
review indicated that alcohol consumption had a non-significant
effect on sexual arousal,
whereas the mere expectation of drinking alcohol significantly
increased sexual arousal
(Hull & Bond, 1986). From this perspective, behaviours that are
disinhibited after
drinking a placebo can be understood as a consequence of the
activation of alcohol-
related concepts in memory. In one study, the mere subliminal
activation of alcohol-
related concepts caused men to rate the faces of women as more
sexually attractive
(Friedman, McCarty, Forster, & Denzler, 2005).
Drunkenness is thus not merely a physiological consequence of
alcohol, but involves
complex interactions of both limited processing capacities
(myopia theory, see below)
and chronically and temporarily activated mental
representations that make certain
patterns of responding more accessible (expectancy theory, see
below). According to the
dual-process model of the alcohol behaviour (Moss & Albery,
2009), a full understanding
of alcohol effects has to integrate both pharmacological and
extra-pharmacological
consequences of alcohol on human cognition and behaviour.
Expectancies are the first
component of the model. They are considered as the result of
learned associations
between alcohol-related representations in memory. The sources
of this associative
process could be referred to as conditioning (Hull & Bond,
1986) or vicarious learning
(Bandura, 1965). For example, content analyses show that
media characters who
drink alcohol are generally depicted as more attractive than
those who do not drink
alcohol (McIntosh, 1999). Hence, to the extent that people
strongly endorse alcohol-
self-enhancement expectancies, concepts of ‘alcohol’ and
‘attractiveness’ would be
linked together in memory. According to alcohol expectancy
theory, alcohol-related cues
could implicitly activate alcohol-related expectancies, which
could, in turn, affect social
judgements and behaviours that are in line with these alcohol-
related expectancies. The
concept of alcohol expectancy is based on a semantic network
model of memory (Collins
& Quillian, 1969), which posits that concepts that frequently
co-occur, or share a similar
meaning, are stored close together in memory. When one
concept is activated, other
related concepts also become more accessible through a
spreading activation process
(Collins & Loftus, 1975). For instance, social knowledge
regarding alcohol effects is
automatically activated in memory during the natural course of
perception, without
awareness or intention. Knowledge activation, in turn, shapes
and guides people’s
impressions, judgements, feelings, and intentions without
awareness that such influence
is occurring (see Bargh & Erin, 2006; Bargh & Ferguson, 2000;
Ferguson & Bargh, 2004).
Another aspect of the dual-process model is related to the
physiological consequences
of alcohol consumption. According to the attention allocation
model, alcohol has a
226 Laurent B�egue et al.
‘myopic’ or narrowing effect on attention (Giancola & Corman,
2007; Steele & Josephs,
1990), which causes people to focus attention on the most
salient cues and to not
pay attention to more subtle or distal cues. Alcohol myopia is
therefore defined as
a state of short-sightedness in which superficially understood,
immediate aspects of
experience have a disproportionate influence on behaviours and
emotions (Steele &
Josephs, 1990). Although a sober individual can consider a
range of information more
or less salient before responding to a social situation, an
intoxicated individual will be
less concerned with consideration distal in time and place
because he will be captive
of an impoverished version of reality in which the breadth,
depth, and timeline of his
understanding will be affected. Various studies show that
intoxicated people no longer
have the prerequisite processing skills to attend to all of the
multiple cues involved in
social behaviour (Streufert, Pogash, & Gingrich, 1993) and seek
cognitive closure (Lange,
2002).
In our study on perceived attractiveness, two hypotheses were
possible. First, alcohol
could lead to a general increase of perceived attractiveness,
because being attractive is a
salient feature of the self. Second, alcohol could produce more
polarized responses such
that attractive people would judge themselves even more
attractive, whereas unattractive
people would judge themselves as even less attractive.
Overview of present research
The present research investigates the effects of alcohol
consumption on self-perceived
attractiveness. In Study 1, carried out in a barroom, we analyse
the relationship between
an objective measure of intoxication (i.e., breathalyser reading)
and self-perceived
attractiveness. Study 2, an experimental study, clarifies the
causal link between alcohol
consumption and self-perceived attractiveness using a balanced
placebo design (Marlatt
& Rohsenow, 1980), which allows one to separate the
pharmacological effects of alcohol
from the psychological effects of alcohol. In Study 2, objective
measure of attractiveness
were also obtained by independent raters to determine whether
the effects of alcohol
consumption on self-perceived attractiveness are grounded in
reality, or whether they
are simply an illusion of the drinker.
STUDY 1
Study 1 provided an initial test of the hypothesis that
intoxicated people think they
are more attractive than sober people do. One major strength of
Study 1 is that it was
conducted in a naturalistic setting – a barroom.
Method
Participants
Participants were 19 customers (63% males; Mage = 22.5, SD =
5.0, range = 19–40)
in a barroom in Grenoble, France. They received a lottery ticket
in exchange for their
voluntary participation.
Procedure
Participants rated how attractive, bright, original, and funny
they felt at the moment
(1 = not at all to 7 = extremely; Cronbach’s � = .71; M = 4.27,
SD = 1.11). Next, we
Alcohol and perceived attractiveness 227
estimated blood alcohol level (BAL) using a breathalyser
(Draeger 5100S; M = 0.34%,
SD = 0.38). A debriefing followed.
Results and Discussion
Because they were not normally distributed, BAL values were
transformed using a natural
log function. As expected, the higher the BAL, the more
attractive participants thought
they were, r = .56, p = .012.
These results are consistent with the hypothesis that intoxicated
people think they
are more attractive than sober people do. Because of the
correlational nature of Study
1, however, we cannot rule out the possibility that individuals
who think they are
attractive tend to drink more in barrooms, or that some third
factor is related to perceived
attractiveness and alcohol consumption.
Study 1 also does not allow one to determine whether it is the
actual consumption
of alcohol or the mere belief that one has consumed alcohol that
relates to perceived
attractiveness. In the real world it is impossible to separate the
pharmacological and
expectancy effects of alcohol, but in the laboratory it is possible
to separate them using a
balanced placebo design (Marlatt & Rohsenow, 1980). Study 2
was therefore carried
out to disentangle both possible origins of the alcohol-self-
perceived attractiveness
relationship.
Study 1 also did not allow us to test whether intoxicated
participants were, in fact,
more attractive. We wanted to conduct videotaped interviews
with barroom patrons,
and then show these interviews to independent judges, but this
was not possible. Study
2 also overcomes this weakness of Study 1.
STUDY 2
In Study 2, we experimentally tested the expectancy and
pharmacological effects of
alcohol consumption on self-evaluated attractiveness.
Participants drank a beverage that
contained or did not contain alcohol. Within each group, half
were told the beverage
contained alcohol and half were told it contained no alcohol.
Next, participants delivered
a message that was filmed, supposedly to be used in future
advertisements for the
beverage. After watching the filmed message, participants rated
how attractive, bright,
original, and funny they thought they were. We predicted that
alcohol consumption
would increase self-perceived attractiveness, as in Study 1.
However, we were unsure
whether this effect would be due to the pharmacological effects
of alcohol, the
expectancy effects of alcohol, or both.
As an objective measure of how attractive participants were,
independent judges,
blind to beverage conditions, also rated participants on the same
dimensions. Because
the judges were sober, we predicted that alcohol consumption
would be unrelated to
this objective measure of attractiveness.
Method
Participants
Participants were 94 French men. Three did not follow
instructions, and two in placebo
condition and three participants in anti-placebo condition
suspected a discrepancy
between what they were told concerning their beverage and
what they were actually
228 Laurent B�egue et al.
given. We therefore excluded them from the sample. Thus, the
final sample included
86 men (Mage = 27, SD = 7). Participants were recruited via
newspaper advertisements
for a taste-test study and were paid 14€ ($21) per hour. Men
who responded to the ads
were interviewed over the phone, ostensibly to determine if they
were allergic to any
foods, including alcohol. Potential at-risk drinkers were
identified by the CAGE screening
test for alcohol dependence (Beresford, Blow, Hill, Singer, &
Lucey, 1990), and were
excluded from the study.
Procedure
Participants were told the private research firm Stat-Food
(actually a bogus company)
was conducting a taste-test study at a community health centre.
Participants fasted from
food and drink (except water) for 3 hr prior to their scheduled
appointment (Millar,
Hammersley, & Finnigan, 1992). A physician verified that each
participant was healthy.
After informed consent was obtained, participants were
randomly assigned to
beverage conditions in a balanced placebo design. The balanced
placebo design is a
2 × 2 factorial design that crosses alcohol content (participants
drink a beverage that
contains either alcohol or no alcohol) with alcohol-related
expectancies (participants
are told that their beverage either contains or does not contain
alcohol). The major
strength of the balanced placebo design is that it allows
researchers to untangle the
pharmacological effects of alcohol from the expectancy effects
of alcohol.
Unfortunately, suspicion is often very high in the balanced
placebo design, as high
as 90% in some studies (Martin & Sayette, 1993). Three
different types of cues can make
participants suspicious: (1) internal cues (i.e., participants in
the placebo condition
do not feel intoxicated even though they are told their beverage
contains alcohol;
participants in the anti-placebo condition feel intoxicated even
though they are told
their beverage contains no alcohol); (2) gustative cues (i.e.,
participants in the placebo
condition expect to taste alcohol, but do not taste it;
participants in the anti-placebo
condition do not expect to taste alcohol, but they taste it), and
(3) instructional cues
(e.g., manipulation checks make participants question the actual
content of the beverage,
cover stories are not believable). In Study 2, as in our previous
research (e.g., Bègue
et al., 2009), we attempt to reduce suspicion by focusing on all
three cues. We handled
the issue of internal cues indirectly by using several distracting
tasks to divert participants’
attention away from their bodily sensations. Previous alcohol
research has shown that
distraction decreases the salience of interoceptive cues
(Rohsenow & Marlatt, 1981).
The issue of gustative cues was handled by a major change in
typical procedures used
in alcohol-related research. In the anti-placebo condition,
participants were told that
we were testing a new non-alcoholic beverage that tasted like
alcohol, for people who
appreciated the taste of alcohol but wished to avoid drinking
alcohol. In the placebo
group, we mixed a small quantity of alcohol in the beverage,
placed alcohol on the surface
of the beverage, and sprayed alcohol on the rim of the glass. We
handled the issue of
instructional cues by disguising the study as a taste-test study.
In addition to handling
these three cues, we also used people from the general
population as participants,
because they are far less suspicious about psychological studies
than college students
are.
Each participant was given three cold isovolemic glasses that
contained a cocktail of
grapefruit and grenadine cordial, mint, and lemon concentrate.
For half the participants,
the beverage contained 2.01 oz of pure alcohol to target a peak
BAL of 0.10 g/100 ml.
The dose was not adjusted, except when the participant’s weight
was more than 20 kg
Alcohol and perceived attractiveness 229
under or over the median weight (75 kg). Within each group,
half the participants were
told that the beverage contained alcohol (the equivalent of five
to six shots of vodka),
whereas the remaining participants were told that the beverage
contained no alcohol.
In the expected alcohol conditions, the rims of the glasses were
sprayed with alcohol
immediately prior to serving. The drinks were mixed by a
research assistant, allowing
the experimenter to be blind to beverage condition.
Participants were given 10 min to consume their beverage.
Next, they were given
5 min to write an advertising message that would allegedly be
used by the (bogus)
company Stat-Food to promote their products. Participants then
evaluated their drinks,
which took 15 additional minutes (giving time for alcohol
absorption for participants
who consumed an alcoholic beverage and distracting
participants who consumed a
placebo beverage from focusing on internal cues). Next,
participants delivered their
advertising message on a stage while a female experimenter
filmed them. After the
recording, participants viewed their advertising message and, as
in Study 1, rated how
attractive, bright, original, and funny they thought they were (1
= not at all to 7 =
extremely; Cronbach’s � = .70).
Participants then left the main room, were offered some food
and drink, and were
kept busy with various tasks. When their BAL was theoretically
near to 0, an experimenter
posing as the person in charge of the food evaluation agency
took them to another room
and asked various questions about the agency’s hostess and the
tasting experience. By
that pre-debriefing procedure, we expected to hinder the
participants’ propensity to
answer consistently with what another experimenter had
previously told them (see
Knight, Barbaree, & Boland, 1986 for a description of this
debriefing procedure). The
experimenter doing the debriefing pretended not to be informed
of what they had drunk
and the participants had simply to inform him at the beginning
of the interview (see
Knight et al., 1986). If there was a discrepancy between the
quantity of alcohol said to
be in the drink and what the participant reported in the
debriefing, or if the participant
expressed doubts about the content of the drink, he was
considered suspicious and
was discarded from the sample. Five participants were
discarded, two in the placebo
condition and three in anti-placebo condition.
When the manipulation verification phase was complete, each
participant received
a thorough debriefing. All participants agreed that the collected
data could be used for
research purposes. We then estimated BAL with a breath
alcohol testing device (Draeger
5100S). Once BAL was equal to 0.00, participants were
thanked, paid, and released from
the lab.
Validation of self-evaluations of attractiveness by independent
judges
To obtain an objective measure of how attractive speakers were,
an independent group
also evaluated the filmed messages. Judges were 22 university
students (36% males;
Mage = 20, SD = 3). Each judge evaluated the filmed messages
from all 86 participants.
The judges were blind to any information about the alcohol
consumption/expectancy
status of the participant. They used the same rating dimensions
and rating scales as
participants did. Judges rated whether the person in the filmed
performance was
attractive, bright, original, and funny (1 = not at all to 7 =
extremely; Cronbach’s
� = .95).
230 Laurent B�egue et al.
Results and Discussion
Self-evaluations
Data were analysed using a 2 (given alcohol vs. given no
alcohol) × 2 (expected alcohol
vs. expected no alcohol) ANOVA. Results showed that
participants who thought they had
consumed alcohol expressed more positive self-evaluations than
did those who thought
they had not consumed alcohol, Ms = 3.91 and 3.42,
respectively, F(1,85) = 4.03, p =
.04, d = 0.44. The main effect of alcohol content was non-
significant, and the interaction
between alcohol content and alcohol expectancy, were both non-
significant, F(1,82) =
2.46, p = .12, and F(1,82) = 1.38, p = .24, respectively. A
Levene’s test showed that
alcohol and non-alcohol group variances did not differ (p =
.55), which suggested that no
polarization effect of alcohol of self-perceived attractiveness
was observed. Descriptive
statistics are in Table 1. These results suggest that alcohol
related expectancies, but not
actual alcohol content, influenced self-evaluations of
attractiveness.
Validation of self-evaluations by independent judges
Judges’ ratings of speeches were analysed using a 2 (given
alcohol vs. given no alcohol) ×
2 (expected alcohol vs. expected no alcohol) ANOVA. No
significant effects were found.
These findings indicate that the boost in self-perceived
attractiveness experienced by
people who thought they were drunk was unrelated to the way
they were perceived
by independent raters. Judges blind to beverage condition gave
similar attractiveness
ratings to people who thought they were drunk and to people
who thought they were
sober, Ms = 3.51 and 3.45, respectively, F(1,85) = 0.09, p > .80,
d = 0.065. Descriptive
statistics are in Table 2.
Table 1. Self-perceived attractiveness as a function of alcohol
consumption and alcohol expectancy
Expected
Alcohol No alcohol
M SD M SD
Alcohol 3.96 1.33 3.42 1.12
No alcohol 3.86 1.00 3.09 1.11
Table 2. Judges evaluations of attractiveness as a function of
target’s alcohol consumption and alcohol
expected
Expected
Alcohol No alcohol
M SD M SD
Alcohol 3.61 1.13 3.55 0.87
No alcohol 3.40 0.78 3.35 0.73
Alcohol and perceived attractiveness 231
GENERAL DISCUSSION
Our results showed that when people drink alcohol, they
evaluate themselves as
more attractive (or at least, less unattractive), but this self-
perception appears to
be an illusion. When independent judges evaluate attractiveness,
the ratings are not
influenced by expected or actual alcohol consumption. Our use
of the balanced
placebo design in Study 2 showed 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
findings are consistent with
dual-process alcohol models that propose that the mind may still
become ‘intoxi-
cated’ if people expect to consume alcohol, even if they do not
consume a single
drop (Moss & Albery, 2009). These results are consistent with
the hypothesis that
alcohol stimuli operate on implicit expectancies, which, in turn,
influence explicit
self-perception.
Our findings also indicate that alcohol-related expectancies lead
to a general
increase of perceived attractiveness. There was no evidence that
alcohol-related
expectancies decreased perceived attractiveness in unattractive
individuals. Indeed,
almost everyone thinks they are more attractive after they think
they have con-
sumed alcohol. Moreover, our analysis showed that alcohol and
non-alcohol group
variances did not differ, which suggested that no polarization
effect of alcohol of
self-perceived attractiveness was observed. In order to find such
a polarization, we
maybe should have introduced salient cues referring to body
self-esteem. According
to the alcohol myopia theory (Steele & Josephs, 1990), in such a
case, attractive
people could have perceived themselves as even more attractive,
whereas the re-
verse may have occurred with less attractive people. Future
research is needed
to clarify the interesting issue of polarization under the
physiological influence of
alcohol.
Our study has also indicated that the quantity of alcohol
ingested was not related
to self-perceived attractiveness. We may hypothesize that pre-
experimental individuals’
alcohol use and chronic self-representations should be further
investigated to understand
such a result. A within-subjects experiment could provide useful
information regarding
this issue.
Previous studies have shown that alcohol consumption increases
the attractiveness
of members of the opposite sex (Jones, Jones, Thomas, & Piper,
2003). Our studies
provide complementary results showing that the mere belief that
one has consumed
alcohol increases self-perceived attractiveness. This is an
important topic to deal with
because self-perceived attractiveness has been shown to
significantly influence intimate
interactions. For example, in one diary study it was observed
that people who thought
they were attractive had more intimate interactions of all types
than did those who
thought they were less attractive (Nezlek, 1999).
In summary, the present research shows that alcohol-related
expectancies can
significantly boost self-perceived attractiveness. However, the
perceived attractiveness
lies in the eyes of the ‘beer holder’ and is not shared by anyone
else.
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank the editor and three anonymous
reviewers for their insightful
comments and their very useful suggestions.
232 Laurent B�egue et al.
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234 Laurent B�egue et al.
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‘Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder’ Peoplewho think t.docx

  • 1. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder’: People who think they are drunk also think they are attractive Laurent Bègue1∗ , Brad J. Bushman2,3, Oulmann Zerhouni1, Baptiste Subra4 and Medhi Ourabah5 1University of Grenoble 2, France 2The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA 3VU University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands 4University of Paris Descartes, France 5University of Paris 8, Saint-Denis, France This research examines the role of alcohol consumption on self- perceived attractiveness. Study 1, carried out in a barroom (N = 19), showed that the more alcoholic drinks customers consumed, the more attractive they thought they were. In Study 2, 94 non- student participants in a bogus taste-test study were given either an alcoholic beverage (target BAL [blood alcohol level] = 0.10 g/100 ml) or a non- alcoholic beverage, with half of each group believing they had consumed alcohol and half believing they had not (balanced placebo design). After consuming beverages, they delivered a speech and rated how attractive, bright, original, and funny they thought they were. The speeches were videotaped and rated by 22 independent judges. Results showed that participants who thought they had consumed alcohol gave themselves more positive self-evaluations.
  • 2. However, ratings from independent judges showed that this boost in self-evaluation was unrelated to actual performance. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder’ —Kinky Friedman Alcohol has many consequences on social perception and relationships. After a drink, intoxicated people see members of the opposite sex through ‘beer goggles’, which makes them look especially attractive (Jones, Jones, Thomas, & Piper, 2003; Lyvers, Cholakians, Puorro, & Sundram, 2011; Neave, Tsang, & Heather, 2008). But alcohol can also influence self-perceptions. Previous research on alcohol and self- awareness has found that alcohol reduces self-awareness by inhibiting self-relevant encoding processes (Hull, Levenson, Young, & Sher, 1983). The purpose of the present research is to test the hypothesis ∗Correspondence should be addressed to Laurent Bègue, University of Grenoble 2, LIP, 1251, Av. Centrale, BP47, 38040 Grenoble, France (e-mail: [email protected]). DOI:10.1111/j.2044-8295.2012.02114.x British Journal of Psychology (2013), 104, 225–234 © 201 The British Psychological Society www.wileyonlinelibrary.com 225
  • 3. 2 that alcohol consumption increases self-perceived attractiveness. Whereas meta-analytic reviews indicate that alcohol consumption enhances mood and sexual arousal (Hull & Bond, 1986), the link between alcohol consumption and self- perceived attractiveness remains to be clarified and theoretically developed. In order to understand the link between alcohol and self- processes, we relied on the dual-process model of alcohol-related behaviour (Moss & Albery, 2009; see also Moss & Albery, 2010; Wiers & Stacy, 2010). This model suggests that although alcohol consumption disrupts cognitive controlled processes, the mind may still become ‘intoxicated’ even in the absence of alcohol consumption (Moss & Albery, 2009). For example, when people believe that they are intoxicated, they behave more aggressively (Bègue et al., 2009), and show more sexually disinhibited behaviours (Crowe & Georges, 1989). Various studies indicate that the effects of alcohol on human cognition and behaviour should distinguish pharmacological and social psychological consequences of alcohol consumption. In the field of sexual arousal, for example, a meta-analytic review indicated that alcohol consumption had a non-significant effect on sexual arousal, whereas the mere expectation of drinking alcohol significantly increased sexual arousal
  • 4. (Hull & Bond, 1986). From this perspective, behaviours that are disinhibited after drinking a placebo can be understood as a consequence of the activation of alcohol- related concepts in memory. In one study, the mere subliminal activation of alcohol- related concepts caused men to rate the faces of women as more sexually attractive (Friedman, McCarty, Forster, & Denzler, 2005). Drunkenness is thus not merely a physiological consequence of alcohol, but involves complex interactions of both limited processing capacities (myopia theory, see below) and chronically and temporarily activated mental representations that make certain patterns of responding more accessible (expectancy theory, see below). According to the dual-process model of the alcohol behaviour (Moss & Albery, 2009), a full understanding of alcohol effects has to integrate both pharmacological and extra-pharmacological consequences of alcohol on human cognition and behaviour. Expectancies are the first component of the model. They are considered as the result of learned associations between alcohol-related representations in memory. The sources of this associative process could be referred to as conditioning (Hull & Bond, 1986) or vicarious learning (Bandura, 1965). For example, content analyses show that media characters who drink alcohol are generally depicted as more attractive than those who do not drink alcohol (McIntosh, 1999). Hence, to the extent that people strongly endorse alcohol-
  • 5. self-enhancement expectancies, concepts of ‘alcohol’ and ‘attractiveness’ would be linked together in memory. According to alcohol expectancy theory, alcohol-related cues could implicitly activate alcohol-related expectancies, which could, in turn, affect social judgements and behaviours that are in line with these alcohol- related expectancies. The concept of alcohol expectancy is based on a semantic network model of memory (Collins & Quillian, 1969), which posits that concepts that frequently co-occur, or share a similar meaning, are stored close together in memory. When one concept is activated, other related concepts also become more accessible through a spreading activation process (Collins & Loftus, 1975). For instance, social knowledge regarding alcohol effects is automatically activated in memory during the natural course of perception, without awareness or intention. Knowledge activation, in turn, shapes and guides people’s impressions, judgements, feelings, and intentions without awareness that such influence is occurring (see Bargh & Erin, 2006; Bargh & Ferguson, 2000; Ferguson & Bargh, 2004). Another aspect of the dual-process model is related to the physiological consequences of alcohol consumption. According to the attention allocation model, alcohol has a 226 Laurent B�egue et al.
  • 6. ‘myopic’ or narrowing effect on attention (Giancola & Corman, 2007; Steele & Josephs, 1990), which causes people to focus attention on the most salient cues and to not pay attention to more subtle or distal cues. Alcohol myopia is therefore defined as a state of short-sightedness in which superficially understood, immediate aspects of experience have a disproportionate influence on behaviours and emotions (Steele & Josephs, 1990). Although a sober individual can consider a range of information more or less salient before responding to a social situation, an intoxicated individual will be less concerned with consideration distal in time and place because he will be captive of an impoverished version of reality in which the breadth, depth, and timeline of his understanding will be affected. Various studies show that intoxicated people no longer have the prerequisite processing skills to attend to all of the multiple cues involved in social behaviour (Streufert, Pogash, & Gingrich, 1993) and seek cognitive closure (Lange, 2002). In our study on perceived attractiveness, two hypotheses were possible. First, alcohol could lead to a general increase of perceived attractiveness, because being attractive is a salient feature of the self. Second, alcohol could produce more polarized responses such that attractive people would judge themselves even more attractive, whereas unattractive people would judge themselves as even less attractive.
  • 7. Overview of present research The present research investigates the effects of alcohol consumption on self-perceived attractiveness. In Study 1, carried out in a barroom, we analyse the relationship between an objective measure of intoxication (i.e., breathalyser reading) and self-perceived attractiveness. Study 2, an experimental study, clarifies the causal link between alcohol consumption and self-perceived attractiveness using a balanced placebo design (Marlatt & Rohsenow, 1980), which allows one to separate the pharmacological effects of alcohol from the psychological effects of alcohol. In Study 2, objective measure of attractiveness were also obtained by independent raters to determine whether the effects of alcohol consumption on self-perceived attractiveness are grounded in reality, or whether they are simply an illusion of the drinker. STUDY 1 Study 1 provided an initial test of the hypothesis that intoxicated people think they are more attractive than sober people do. One major strength of Study 1 is that it was conducted in a naturalistic setting – a barroom. Method Participants Participants were 19 customers (63% males; Mage = 22.5, SD = 5.0, range = 19–40) in a barroom in Grenoble, France. They received a lottery ticket in exchange for their voluntary participation.
  • 8. Procedure Participants rated how attractive, bright, original, and funny they felt at the moment (1 = not at all to 7 = extremely; Cronbach’s � = .71; M = 4.27, SD = 1.11). Next, we Alcohol and perceived attractiveness 227 estimated blood alcohol level (BAL) using a breathalyser (Draeger 5100S; M = 0.34%, SD = 0.38). A debriefing followed. Results and Discussion Because they were not normally distributed, BAL values were transformed using a natural log function. As expected, the higher the BAL, the more attractive participants thought they were, r = .56, p = .012. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that intoxicated people think they are more attractive than sober people do. Because of the correlational nature of Study 1, however, we cannot rule out the possibility that individuals who think they are attractive tend to drink more in barrooms, or that some third factor is related to perceived attractiveness and alcohol consumption. Study 1 also does not allow one to determine whether it is the actual consumption of alcohol or the mere belief that one has consumed alcohol that relates to perceived attractiveness. In the real world it is impossible to separate the
  • 9. pharmacological and expectancy effects of alcohol, but in the laboratory it is possible to separate them using a balanced placebo design (Marlatt & Rohsenow, 1980). Study 2 was therefore carried out to disentangle both possible origins of the alcohol-self- perceived attractiveness relationship. Study 1 also did not allow us to test whether intoxicated participants were, in fact, more attractive. We wanted to conduct videotaped interviews with barroom patrons, and then show these interviews to independent judges, but this was not possible. Study 2 also overcomes this weakness of Study 1. STUDY 2 In Study 2, we experimentally tested the expectancy and pharmacological effects of alcohol consumption on self-evaluated attractiveness. Participants drank a beverage that contained or did not contain alcohol. Within each group, half were told the beverage contained alcohol and half were told it contained no alcohol. Next, participants delivered a message that was filmed, supposedly to be used in future advertisements for the beverage. After watching the filmed message, participants rated how attractive, bright, original, and funny they thought they were. We predicted that alcohol consumption would increase self-perceived attractiveness, as in Study 1. However, we were unsure whether this effect would be due to the pharmacological effects of alcohol, the
  • 10. expectancy effects of alcohol, or both. As an objective measure of how attractive participants were, independent judges, blind to beverage conditions, also rated participants on the same dimensions. Because the judges were sober, we predicted that alcohol consumption would be unrelated to this objective measure of attractiveness. Method Participants Participants were 94 French men. Three did not follow instructions, and two in placebo condition and three participants in anti-placebo condition suspected a discrepancy between what they were told concerning their beverage and what they were actually 228 Laurent B�egue et al. given. We therefore excluded them from the sample. Thus, the final sample included 86 men (Mage = 27, SD = 7). Participants were recruited via newspaper advertisements for a taste-test study and were paid 14€ ($21) per hour. Men who responded to the ads were interviewed over the phone, ostensibly to determine if they were allergic to any foods, including alcohol. Potential at-risk drinkers were identified by the CAGE screening test for alcohol dependence (Beresford, Blow, Hill, Singer, & Lucey, 1990), and were excluded from the study.
  • 11. Procedure Participants were told the private research firm Stat-Food (actually a bogus company) was conducting a taste-test study at a community health centre. Participants fasted from food and drink (except water) for 3 hr prior to their scheduled appointment (Millar, Hammersley, & Finnigan, 1992). A physician verified that each participant was healthy. After informed consent was obtained, participants were randomly assigned to beverage conditions in a balanced placebo design. The balanced placebo design is a 2 × 2 factorial design that crosses alcohol content (participants drink a beverage that contains either alcohol or no alcohol) with alcohol-related expectancies (participants are told that their beverage either contains or does not contain alcohol). The major strength of the balanced placebo design is that it allows researchers to untangle the pharmacological effects of alcohol from the expectancy effects of alcohol. Unfortunately, suspicion is often very high in the balanced placebo design, as high as 90% in some studies (Martin & Sayette, 1993). Three different types of cues can make participants suspicious: (1) internal cues (i.e., participants in the placebo condition do not feel intoxicated even though they are told their beverage contains alcohol; participants in the anti-placebo condition feel intoxicated even though they are told
  • 12. their beverage contains no alcohol); (2) gustative cues (i.e., participants in the placebo condition expect to taste alcohol, but do not taste it; participants in the anti-placebo condition do not expect to taste alcohol, but they taste it), and (3) instructional cues (e.g., manipulation checks make participants question the actual content of the beverage, cover stories are not believable). In Study 2, as in our previous research (e.g., Bègue et al., 2009), we attempt to reduce suspicion by focusing on all three cues. We handled the issue of internal cues indirectly by using several distracting tasks to divert participants’ attention away from their bodily sensations. Previous alcohol research has shown that distraction decreases the salience of interoceptive cues (Rohsenow & Marlatt, 1981). The issue of gustative cues was handled by a major change in typical procedures used in alcohol-related research. In the anti-placebo condition, participants were told that we were testing a new non-alcoholic beverage that tasted like alcohol, for people who appreciated the taste of alcohol but wished to avoid drinking alcohol. In the placebo group, we mixed a small quantity of alcohol in the beverage, placed alcohol on the surface of the beverage, and sprayed alcohol on the rim of the glass. We handled the issue of instructional cues by disguising the study as a taste-test study. In addition to handling these three cues, we also used people from the general population as participants, because they are far less suspicious about psychological studies than college students
  • 13. are. Each participant was given three cold isovolemic glasses that contained a cocktail of grapefruit and grenadine cordial, mint, and lemon concentrate. For half the participants, the beverage contained 2.01 oz of pure alcohol to target a peak BAL of 0.10 g/100 ml. The dose was not adjusted, except when the participant’s weight was more than 20 kg Alcohol and perceived attractiveness 229 under or over the median weight (75 kg). Within each group, half the participants were told that the beverage contained alcohol (the equivalent of five to six shots of vodka), whereas the remaining participants were told that the beverage contained no alcohol. In the expected alcohol conditions, the rims of the glasses were sprayed with alcohol immediately prior to serving. The drinks were mixed by a research assistant, allowing the experimenter to be blind to beverage condition. Participants were given 10 min to consume their beverage. Next, they were given 5 min to write an advertising message that would allegedly be used by the (bogus) company Stat-Food to promote their products. Participants then evaluated their drinks, which took 15 additional minutes (giving time for alcohol absorption for participants who consumed an alcoholic beverage and distracting
  • 14. participants who consumed a placebo beverage from focusing on internal cues). Next, participants delivered their advertising message on a stage while a female experimenter filmed them. After the recording, participants viewed their advertising message and, as in Study 1, rated how attractive, bright, original, and funny they thought they were (1 = not at all to 7 = extremely; Cronbach’s � = .70). Participants then left the main room, were offered some food and drink, and were kept busy with various tasks. When their BAL was theoretically near to 0, an experimenter posing as the person in charge of the food evaluation agency took them to another room and asked various questions about the agency’s hostess and the tasting experience. By that pre-debriefing procedure, we expected to hinder the participants’ propensity to answer consistently with what another experimenter had previously told them (see Knight, Barbaree, & Boland, 1986 for a description of this debriefing procedure). The experimenter doing the debriefing pretended not to be informed of what they had drunk and the participants had simply to inform him at the beginning of the interview (see Knight et al., 1986). If there was a discrepancy between the quantity of alcohol said to be in the drink and what the participant reported in the debriefing, or if the participant expressed doubts about the content of the drink, he was considered suspicious and was discarded from the sample. Five participants were
  • 15. discarded, two in the placebo condition and three in anti-placebo condition. When the manipulation verification phase was complete, each participant received a thorough debriefing. All participants agreed that the collected data could be used for research purposes. We then estimated BAL with a breath alcohol testing device (Draeger 5100S). Once BAL was equal to 0.00, participants were thanked, paid, and released from the lab. Validation of self-evaluations of attractiveness by independent judges To obtain an objective measure of how attractive speakers were, an independent group also evaluated the filmed messages. Judges were 22 university students (36% males; Mage = 20, SD = 3). Each judge evaluated the filmed messages from all 86 participants. The judges were blind to any information about the alcohol consumption/expectancy status of the participant. They used the same rating dimensions and rating scales as participants did. Judges rated whether the person in the filmed performance was attractive, bright, original, and funny (1 = not at all to 7 = extremely; Cronbach’s � = .95). 230 Laurent B�egue et al. Results and Discussion
  • 16. Self-evaluations Data were analysed using a 2 (given alcohol vs. given no alcohol) × 2 (expected alcohol vs. expected no alcohol) ANOVA. Results showed that participants who thought they had consumed alcohol expressed more positive self-evaluations than did those who thought they had not consumed alcohol, Ms = 3.91 and 3.42, respectively, F(1,85) = 4.03, p = .04, d = 0.44. The main effect of alcohol content was non- significant, and the interaction between alcohol content and alcohol expectancy, were both non- significant, F(1,82) = 2.46, p = .12, and F(1,82) = 1.38, p = .24, respectively. A Levene’s test showed that alcohol and non-alcohol group variances did not differ (p = .55), which suggested that no polarization effect of alcohol of self-perceived attractiveness was observed. Descriptive statistics are in Table 1. These results suggest that alcohol related expectancies, but not actual alcohol content, influenced self-evaluations of attractiveness. Validation of self-evaluations by independent judges Judges’ ratings of speeches were analysed using a 2 (given alcohol vs. given no alcohol) × 2 (expected alcohol vs. expected no alcohol) ANOVA. No significant effects were found. These findings indicate that the boost in self-perceived attractiveness experienced by people who thought they were drunk was unrelated to the way they were perceived by independent raters. Judges blind to beverage condition gave similar attractiveness ratings to people who thought they were drunk and to people
  • 17. who thought they were sober, Ms = 3.51 and 3.45, respectively, F(1,85) = 0.09, p > .80, d = 0.065. Descriptive statistics are in Table 2. Table 1. Self-perceived attractiveness as a function of alcohol consumption and alcohol expectancy Expected Alcohol No alcohol M SD M SD Alcohol 3.96 1.33 3.42 1.12 No alcohol 3.86 1.00 3.09 1.11 Table 2. Judges evaluations of attractiveness as a function of target’s alcohol consumption and alcohol expected Expected Alcohol No alcohol M SD M SD Alcohol 3.61 1.13 3.55 0.87 No alcohol 3.40 0.78 3.35 0.73 Alcohol and perceived attractiveness 231 GENERAL DISCUSSION Our results showed that when people drink alcohol, they
  • 18. evaluate themselves as more attractive (or at least, less unattractive), but this self- perception appears to be an illusion. When independent judges evaluate attractiveness, the ratings are not influenced by expected or actual alcohol consumption. Our use of the balanced placebo design in Study 2 showed 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 findings are consistent with dual-process alcohol models that propose that the mind may still become ‘intoxi- cated’ if people expect to consume alcohol, even if they do not consume a single drop (Moss & Albery, 2009). These results are consistent with the hypothesis that alcohol stimuli operate on implicit expectancies, which, in turn, influence explicit self-perception. Our findings also indicate that alcohol-related expectancies lead to a general increase of perceived attractiveness. There was no evidence that alcohol-related expectancies decreased perceived attractiveness in unattractive individuals. Indeed, almost everyone thinks they are more attractive after they think they have con- sumed alcohol. Moreover, our analysis showed that alcohol and non-alcohol group variances did not differ, which suggested that no polarization effect of alcohol of self-perceived attractiveness was observed. In order to find such
  • 19. a polarization, we maybe should have introduced salient cues referring to body self-esteem. According to the alcohol myopia theory (Steele & Josephs, 1990), in such a case, attractive people could have perceived themselves as even more attractive, whereas the re- verse may have occurred with less attractive people. Future research is needed to clarify the interesting issue of polarization under the physiological influence of alcohol. Our study has also indicated that the quantity of alcohol ingested was not related to self-perceived attractiveness. We may hypothesize that pre- experimental individuals’ alcohol use and chronic self-representations should be further investigated to understand such a result. A within-subjects experiment could provide useful information regarding this issue. Previous studies have shown that alcohol consumption increases the attractiveness of members of the opposite sex (Jones, Jones, Thomas, & Piper, 2003). Our studies provide complementary results showing that the mere belief that one has consumed alcohol increases self-perceived attractiveness. This is an important topic to deal with because self-perceived attractiveness has been shown to significantly influence intimate interactions. For example, in one diary study it was observed that people who thought they were attractive had more intimate interactions of all types
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