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 […]
Tag: drinking
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 […]
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 […]