America, a rich source of alcohol, of alcoholics, and of aggressive alcoholics, is also rich in scholarship on those subjects. One must drink deep of that scholarship, in many cases, if one cares about the question: what, exactly, did some of those researchers hope to learn by doing that research? Last week, I wrote about some examples. Here […]
Tag: alcohol
What One Learns By Studying Studies about Drinking
To answer the question, What happens when people drink alcohol? one can read through thousands of research studies published in respected scholarly journals. One must look a bit harder to answer a different question: What, exactly, did some of those researchers hope to learn by doing that research? Let’s take a quick hop through the literature in one […]
Scientists Observe Confirmed Case of “Social Drinking”
Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh announce they’ve discovered that drinking in a social setting can increase people’s positive emotions, and help those people bond. According to the researchers, earlier studies purporting to examine this topic looked at so-called “social drinkers” when they drank alone; this study actually put social drinkers in a social setting, and found […]
Intoxicated assumptions
Today’s classroom exercise is to [1] read this snippet from a psychology paper, then [2] identify all the assumptions that the authors make about what people think about, then [3] ask yourself if you believe those assumptions. The paper is “What Men Want: The Role of Reflective Opposite-Sex Normative Preferences in Alcohol Use Among College […]
Anthes and alcohol and reptiles
Emily Anthes occasionally collects (for her Wonderland blog) reports of human behavior that involves both reptiles and potable alcohol. The one she describes here here originated in National Geographic (the graphic below is a pure Anthes creation, describing this characteristic of her blog): First, there was the drunken zookeeper bitten by an irresponsibly handled cobra. […]
Alcoholics’ preference discovered
“Recreation, Leisure and the Alcoholic,” H. Douglas Sessoms and Sidney R. Oakley, Journal of Leisure Research, vol. 1, no. 1, 1969, pp. 21–32. The authors report: “The Curriculum in Recreation Administration of the University of North Carolina and the Alcoholic Rehabilitation Center (ARC) at Butner, N.C., jointly undertook and investigation of the leisure patterns of […]
Booze: Business Benefits
“No Booze? You May Lose: Why Drinkers Earn More Money Than Nondrinkers” Bethany L. Peters and Edward Stringham, Journal of Labor Research, vol. 27, no. 3, Summer 2006, pp. 411–21(http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12122-006-1031-y). (Thanks to Kristine Danowski for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, who are respectively at Analysis Group, Dallas, Texas and at San Jose State […]