Jesse Bering

Perhaps the only thing stopping me from becoming an alcoholic is the fact that I find the taste of alcohol unconscionably offensive. Beer is sewer water. Rum? Cough syrup. I’m likely betraying my unpolished, suburban upbringing here, but even the crème de la crème of liqueurs—say, a gilded bottle of vintage cognac festooned with Swarovski crystals—might as well be a dressed-up container of Liquid Drano to me. And if you’re ever sitting across from me at a fancy restaurant, note my uncontrollable wincing after I lift my glass in surrender to the moment and the first piquant coat of expensive wine rudely invades my taste buds.

But then, somewhere between that second and fourth glass, the noxiousness of ethanol diffuses into a flavor as harmless as spring water, and the psychological effect is—what can I say—pure magic.

Given the sobering costs of drinking on society (alcohol accounts for 70 percent of fatal traffic accidents, and nearly the same annual percentage of murders, spousal battery and child abuse) alcoholism has justifiably been the focus of considerable attention by clinical psychologists over the years. It’s certainly not my intent to downplay these serious issues associated with drinking. Believe me, here in Northern Ireland I’d wager there are more pubs than there are fast food restaurants in all of Texas, and one needn’t look far in Belfast to see how ruinous alcohol can be on the lives of those affected.

Yet one mustn’t always be a teetotaling bore, either. There is such a thing as responsible drinking; and over the past few decades, fun-loving psychologists have occasionally explored some of the quirky effects of moderate drinking on social behavior and cognition. Dostoyevsky used to refer to vodka as the “Russian God,” which, if you think about it, is still a decent metaphor for the type of spiritual escapism available in an 80 proof bottle of today’s Absolut. In fact, back in 1965, Harvard University psychologists Rudolf Kalin and David McClelland, along with Michael Kahn from Yale University, found precisely this type of “metaphysical” effect of drinking on male college students.

In their long-forgotten article published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, these forward-thinking scholars began their piece by hinting at a moralistic conspiracy, asking readers the following question: “Is it possible that the American puritan tradition has led even scientists to overlook some of the ‘positive’ effects of social drinking in stressing that the only value it has is to deaden the individual to real life, to anesthetize him a little so that he suffers less from anxiety?” And so these maverick scientists, eschewing the impolitic nature of their research question, decided to conduct a series of experiments to explore whether moderate drinking inspires creative thought.

The gist of Kalin and his colleagues’ study went something like this. Two comparison groups of male college students were observed in a “natural” setting—for example, a smallish fraternity party or a living room discussion. Unbeknownst to the participants, the groups were randomly assigned to either a “wet” condition (where alcohol was served) or a “dry” condition (where only soft drinks were served). The dry condition therefore was the control condition, but the authors volunteer this inadvertently humorous aside:

Unfortunately, most subjects had expected alcohol to be served at both parties—which was normal on such occasions—so that the subjects in the dry condition were quite angry when they discovered no liquor was available. To keep their cooperation, the experimenter had to promise them a keg of beer after the party was over, but obviously their mood was not ideal for a control or “neutral” condition.