Or why that drinker is an asshole. Ever notice how folks that drink think everyone is doing them harm then turning into assholes over some minor perceived infraction against them?
Well here is a snippet from a well written article:
If you’d never been raised to think things through, you’d assume that most actions people took were fairly intentional, and possibly pointed at causing you harm. The same holds when people are asked to make snap judgements about things happening. But give yourself any amount of time, and you’ll generally think out all the reasons something could have happened, avoiding your natural intentionality bias and preventing heated arguments with otherwise close friends, bar altercations, and 80 percent of all reality show plots. Image via terren in Virginia.
But, as you might have guessed, that reasoned thinking gets lost when there’s a night’s worth of alcohol moving through your brain. In the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, researchers detail a study with 92 men, made to go three hours without food, then given a shot of either juice, or juice with more than a shot of pure alcohol. All the glasses were rimmed with alcohol to mask the placebos. The men thought they took part in a taste test, then did unrelated tasks for 30 minutes.
After that, they were asked to determine whether a series of deliberate, accidental, or vague stated actions (“He deleted the email,” “She looked for her keys,” “She tripped on the jump rope,” etc.) were deliberate or accidental. Ars Technica sums up the results:
Nearly all the participants, no matter what condition, judged all the unambiguous statements correctly. However, when the actions were ambiguous and could have been performed either intentionally or unintentionally, the “drunk” participants were much more likely to perceive the actions as deliberate than the sober participants were.
The study showed that it didn’t much matter whether a man thought he was drunk; the jump to conclusions about an intention only took place when someone actually did have too much in them.
first!