This is the same as saying that increasing the number of gyms will make us more healthy, or lowering the price of sofas will make us more lazy, or paying lawyers the same as binmen will decrease their number and make us less litigious and argumentative.
The answer to all these: it might but it won’t necessarily.
Research carried out on students into binge drinking – and after all these guys are professionals – suggests that it has much more to do with our expectations for drinking. The student’s belief that it made them more attractive, socially inviting and articulate, was directly predicting how much they drank.
Remember, reality is often not as important as our beliefs in affecting our behaviour.
> The abstract from the Journal of Addictive Behaviours
> You can check whether you’re a binge drinker on the BBC site
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Hello, and welcome to PsyBlog. Thanks for dropping by.
This site is all about scientific research into how the mind works.
It’s mostly written by psychologist and author, Dr Jeremy Dean.
I try to dig up fascinating studies that tell us something about what it means to be human.