Make friends by getting sloppy drunk?
University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, News Bureau
No previous studies have tested
the effects of alcohol consumption on social distance, the researchers say.
They report the new findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences.
To
test how social familiarity influences drinking behavior, the researchers asked
study subjects to each bring a friend who would also participate in the study.
The 212 young, healthy social drinkers were assigned to different experimental
conditions.
"In half of the cases, participants drank with a friend," said Catharine Fairbairn, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who led the research. "In the other half, they drank with the friend of another participant -- a stranger."
The
pairs were assigned to consume either alcoholic or nonalcoholic beverages.
The
team gave those in the experimental condition enough alcohol to bring their
blood-alcohol to levels associated with intoxication. The researchers
videotaped the interactions of each pair.
"We
measured distance between the individuals via machine-learning methods that
detect hands, arms, legs and head position for each person in the video,"
said study co-author Nigel Bosch, a professor of information sciences and of
educational psychology at the U. of I. who developed the method. "We used
a bit of geometry to turn the pixel coordinates of people detected in the video
into real-world distances based on objects of known size visible in the
video."
Friends
tended to draw close to one another whether or not they consumed alcohol,
Fairbairn said.
"But
participants interacting with a stranger only moved closer to that individual
if they were intoxicated. The physical distance between these pairs decreased
by about 1 centimeter per three-minute interval," she said.
Those
who drank nonalcoholic beverages with strangers did not draw significantly
closer to one another during the experiment, the team found.
"This
study shows that over time, alcohol reduces physical distance between people
who are not previously acquainted," said study lead author Laura Gurrieri,
a researcher in psychology at the U. of I. "This finding is particularly
important in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic because it suggests that
alcohol might facilitate virus transmission and impede the following of social
distancing guidelines."
Fairbairn
said that participants' ability to move closer to one another was somewhat
constrained as they sat across from one another at a table, and the study was
conducted in a quiet, spacious laboratory and not a bar.
"Folks
would likely draw even closer to one another in a crowded bar with loud music
when compared with our laboratory environment," she said. "That would
have to be the subject of another study."
