A study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin described this phenomenon. With the deepening of the night, the evaluation of men and women in bars on the attractiveness of other heterosexuals has gradually increased. However, in this study, it has not been proved that this is related to alcohol.
In 2008, researchers from the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom conducted a more detailed study. Researchers recruited 84 heterosexual single students who drank alcohol at the University of Bristol, half male and half female, aged 18-22 (average age 20). In addition, the researchers also prepared 40 portrait photos of 20 pairs of heterosexual students (with an average age of about 21 years) who were in love at the University of Bristol. The reason for choosing a couple of lovers is that both men and women in love are similar in terms of attractiveness. Taking them as the evaluation object of attractiveness, the average attractiveness of the male group and the female group will be closer, which is helpful to get accurate results.
During the experiment, some of the subjects needed to drink a little vodka, while the subjects in the control group drank a drink mixed with tonic water (without alcohol). Then the subjects need to rate the attractiveness of the 40 portrait photos mentioned above in seven levels, from low to high. 24 hours after the first test, the subjects need to perform the same test again. After that, the researchers summarized and statistically analyzed the results.
The final conclusion is that drinking alcohol can indeed improve the evaluation of subjects on portrait photos. Interestingly, it has nothing to do with gender. That is to say, in the eyes of the subjects who drank a little wine, both men and women would be more pleasing to the eyes. Moreover, the researchers also found that for male subjects, after drinking for 24 hours, they still had a higher evaluation of the attractiveness of photos of the opposite sex.
However, the researchers also said that there were two problems in their research. On the one hand, the subjects and the people in the photos were students from the same university. Such samples were not representative. In addition, the amount of alcohol consumed by the subjects in the experiment was not high, and the relationship between the amount of alcohol consumed and the degree of evaluation was not established.
The more you drink, the better it looks
A similar study was conducted by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of Bond University in Australia in 2009.
In this study, researchers selected 80 heterosexual subjects (41 men and 39 women) aged 18-29 in the campus bar of Bond University. The subjects need to breathe into the alcohol tester to measure the alcohol concentration in the blood, and then need to evaluate the attractiveness of the opposite sex in the photos provided by the researchers. Finally, the researchers found that the higher the concentration of alcohol in the blood, the higher the evaluation of the attractiveness of the opposite sex in the photos, but if the subjects drank a lot, the relationship would be less obvious.
In addition, a paper published in the British Journal of Psychology in 2009 discussed this issue in more detail from other perspectives [4]. In this paper, Egan Vincent, a professor of psychology at the University of Leicester in the UK, found that in the eyes of men who drank alcohol, the attractiveness of women with makeup and mature and sexy faces increased through a study of 240 subjects from bars and cafes. However, drinking did not increase the evaluation of the attractiveness of the underage women by the male subjects, and it did not make the male overestimate the age of the underage women. Therefore, it is not reliable to shirk the responsibility of having sex with girls on the grounds of drinking alcohol.
In short, there have been many similar studies that have proved that drinking can increase the evaluation of drinkers' attractiveness to others, but the reason for this effect is not very clear. It is speculated that this may be caused by alcohol stimulating the secretion of dopamine in the reward system.
(Intern editor: Cai Junyi)