WE ALL HAVE that one friend who every now and then gets a little too tipsy and starts to get a little too sarcastic and a little too “blunt.” The boozy night out that started off fun quickly turns ugly as he gets more and more belligerent the more beers he downs. The next day he is all apologies, and talking about how he can’t believe that alcohol can change his personality so thoroughly. However, new research has found that people who think they change drastically while under the influence are not really changing that much.
The study, which appeared in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, pulled 156 people into a lab who had already completed a survey on how much they drank and what their perceptions of themselves sober and drunk were. They then were divided into groups of three or four friends, and over 15 minutes drank either a soft drink or a vodka mixed drink designed to get their alcohol blood level to about .09, depending on their height and weight.