Scientists measured how much changing the identity of the drunken man.
MOSCOW, may 15 — RIA Novosti. Personal qualities and behavior of drunk people does not change as much as is commonly believed, say the psychologists, to follow the behavior of a few dozen drinkers and published their findings in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.
“We were surprised that the idea of drunk people and others about how to change their behavior, so very different. The participants of our experiments thought I changed all the five key parameters of their personality, but observers said only that has changed only the degree of extroversion,” says Rachel Grapes (Rachel Winograd) from the University of Missouri in St. Louis (USA).
Drunken people often do not remember what happened to them during the repast and after it, and I think that their behavior changes a lot after they get drunk. In General, this view has not been disputed, including because many traffic accidents and home accidents and crimes occur as a result of alcohol abuse.
The grapes and her colleagues decided to test whether alcohol so greatly changes the personality of the person that he actually becomes a completely different individual, completely different from his sober “version”. To do this, scientists gathered a group of 156 volunteers who agreed to drink for the sake of science in the company of friends and associates, and invited them all in “bar” is specially equipped for these purposes, the lab.
Once in this “wineglass”, half of the participants had the opportunity to drink heavily, and the other volunteers had to be careful, as changing drinking behavior of their “peers”. Thus drinkers had to do the same and record all your feelings and ideas about how to change their own personality and behavior.
Comparing observations of drinkers and sober friends, who knew each other, scientists have tried to understand whether the behavior of drunk people changes visible to others way, or all of these changes remain in the heads themselves drinkers.
As expected the Grapes and her colleagues, drunk people really believed that their behavior changed — they thought, they become more responsible, open to new experiences, less prone to mood swings and more extrovertida.
Observers, however, noticed only the last — it seemed to them that their drunken friends became more persistent in disputes, sociable and active, while other changes remained for them virtually invisible. Accordingly, it is possible to say that the “drunk person” is not much different from the behavior of its owner is sober.
However, according to the Grape, drunk people are not wrong — the changes could really be big and noticeable to themselves tipsy, but they, with the exception of extraversion, the most “visible” part of the personality to the outside observer, remained invisible to their friends.
In the near future, the researchers plan to repeat such observations in these bars in order to cross-check the results of the experiment and to understand, not affected by laboratory environment on its outcome.