Drinking alcohol increases the likelihood of approaching someone you find attractive, but it does not improve your physical appearance.
- Alcohol does not affect the perception of physical attractiveness.
- In contrast, alcoholic beverages increased the likelihood that participants would choose to interact with more attractive people.
- “The social motivations and intentions” of adults who drink alcohol change when they consume it.
Drinking alcohol doesn’t make strangers look better, but it does build consumers’ confidence, making it easier to approach them. This is what researchers from the universities of Stanford and Pittsburgh (United States) revealed in a recent study.
Evaluating the attractiveness of people after drinking or not drinking alcohol
To reach this conclusion, they recruited 18 pairs of male friends, aged 21 to 27. Participants had to go to the laboratory twice. The first time, the duo drank alcohol (up to approximately 0.08% blood alcohol level, the legal limit for driving in the United States) and on the other occasion, they sipped a drink non-alcoholic. During the experiment, volunteers had to rate the attractiveness of people seen in photos and videos. After giving ratings, they were asked to select the ones they would most like to interact with. The team brought friends together in the lab to see the social interactions that would typically take place in “a real-life drinking situation.”
Alcohol boosts self-confidence
According to the results, published in the journal Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, whether or not adults were intoxicated had no effect on the perceived attractiveness of others. However, alcohol consumption affected men’s likelihood of wanting to interact with people they found attractive. When they were drinking alcoholic beverages, they were 1.71 times more likely to select one of the four most attractive people to potentially meet in a future study, compared to when they were sober.
Simply put, alcohol may not change perceptions of physical attractiveness, but rather enhances confidence in interactions, giving men the courage to want to meet those they find most attractive, who they would perhaps be much less likely to do otherwise. “People who drink alcohol do well to recognize that the social motivations and intentions they hold change when they consume alcohol, in ways that may be attractive in the short term, but which may prove harmful in the long term”, explained Molly A. Bowdring, author of the research, in a statement.
