How Drunk You Feel Depends on Who You’re With

In an atmosphere with many other individuals consuming alcohol, drinkers are more likely to underestimate how much they’ve had to drink, their own levels of intoxication, and the health implications of their consumption. Between the hours of 8 p.m. and 3 a.m., the researchers approached every seventh person who walked by and asked if they could measure that person’s blood-alcohol? levels with a breath test.

Cardiff University social scientist Simon Moore, an author on the study, remarked in a release that “we could either work to reduce the number of very drunk people in a drinking environment, or we could increase the number of people who are sober”.

‘We could either work to reduce the number of very drunk people in a drinking environment, or we could increase the number of people who are sober.

‘Understanding how people judge their drunkenness is an important first step towards designing environments and honing interventions to reduce excessive drinking and drinking misbehaviour’.

And as you may have inferred from every bad night out you had in college, it wasn’t the absolute number of drinks that individuals had that predicted how drunk they thought they were, but rather how much their friends were or weren’t drinking. For example, the participants rated how drunk they were on a scale from 1 (totally sober) to 10 (completely drunk), and how likely they thought it was that drinking would damage their health in the next 15 years, from a 1 (definitely will not) to 10 (definitely will).

People evaluate their levels of drunkenness by comparing themselves with the people that surround them. Think again. Researchers are reporting in the journal BMC Public Health that our perception of just how intoxicated we are shifts depending on those around us, so much so that we think we’re less drunk when around people who are more so and we think we’re more drunk when around those who are sober.

Researchers suggest that the study’s findings may reveal the flawless way to make people in clubs calm down on the drinking. Additionally, the more sober their peers were, the drunker and more foolish individuals felt-regardless of what their BrAC levels actually were. They ended up doing alcohol tests with 1,862 people, 400 of whom answered all the questions. They discovered that the drinkers are more aware of how drunk they are when there are more sober people around them. Those with blood-alcohol levels of zero were not included. “Men on average had higher BrAC levels than women”, reads the report.

There will be more research in the future to find out how drunk people are feeling around sober individuals.

The researchers noted that the study did have limitations. The researchers mentioned that they tried to survey people who were not in the same social circles.