Raise Your Glass to Kinder Self-Assessment through Beer Goggles!
Surely you know about the Nobels — the highly-esteemed, international awards given in a variety of categories ranging from economics to literature for over one hundred years — but you may not know about the Ig Nobel Prizes, which for the past 23 years have been honoring amusing efforts in a variety of scientific categories. To give you an idea of the general tone, consider the name Ig Nobel is a combination of the word “ignoble” (meaning, “not honorable in character or purpose”) and Nobel, which refers to the prestigious awards.
The annual Ig Nobel gala happened last night at Harvard and among the winners were some fearless researchers taking a long, hard look at how “beer goggles” affect the “wearer.” Conventional wisdom goes that the more you drink, the more attractive everyone seems to be. But what about the person drinking? Do beer goggles improve self-assessments of attractiveness? Laurent Bègue, Brad Bushman, Oulmann Zerhouni, Baptiste Subra and Medhi Ourabah, who co-authored ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder’: People who think they are drunk also think they are attractive, performed some experiments that suggest that not only does alcohol make us feel more attractive, but that just thinking that we’ve had a drink makes us feel more attractive than we are. Per their abstract:
This research examines the role of alcohol consumption on self-perceived attractiveness. Study 1, carried out in a barroom (N= 19), showed that the more alcoholic drinks customers consumed, the more attractive they thought they were. In Study 2, 94 non-student participants in a bogus taste-test study were given either an alcoholic beverage (target BAL [blood alcohol level]= 0.10 g/100 ml) or a non-alcoholic beverage, with half of each group believing they had consumed alcohol and half believing they had not (balanced placebo design). After consuming beverages, they delivered a speech and rated how attractive, bright, original, and funny they thought they were. The speeches were videotaped and rated by 22 independent judges. Results showed that participants who thought they had consumed alcohol gave themselves more positive self-evaluations. However, ratings from independent judges showed that this boost in self-evaluation was unrelated to actual performance.
Guess that whole thing about liquid courage isn’t all nonsense. When you go out for a drink tonight, raise your glass to your soon-to-be increased attractiveness.
Header image by Nejmlez.
