Anticipation of drinking boosts self-esteem

To loosen up and feel confident, it is enough to drink a glass of tea. If, of course, you convince yourself that there is whiskey in the glass, not tea.

Alcohol, they say, helps you feel confident. Some people drink "for courage" before a risky undertaking, the outcome of which they are not sure of. For example, before a public speech. Or before approaching someone they like. Some people drink simply to feel more relaxed in a group. Alcohol gives you self-confidence, loosens your tongue and increases your self-esteem: we stop being afraid of condemnation from others. But, as French psychologists from the Pierre Mendes-France University have found out, alcohol itself is not at all necessary: it is enough to simply think that you are drinking something alcoholic.

To begin, the researchers made sure that alcohol really does boost self-esteem. Psychologists went to a bar and asked 19 drinkers (two-thirds of whom were men) to rate their own attractiveness on a seven-point scale. At the same time, the scientists checked the level of alcohol in the blood with a breathalyzer. The answers were predictable: the more a person drank, the more irresistible he considered himself.

At the next stage, the researchers invited about a hundred volunteers to take part in an advertising campaign for a new fruit cocktail. There was no advertising campaign, of course, but such a legend created the appearance of naturalness of what was happening. Then came a psychological trick: some of those who came were told that they would drink an alcoholic cocktail, others - that it was a non-alcoholic one. But the drink itself was prepared in such a way that the participants in the experiment would not guess the actual alcohol content in it. That is, they relied only on the information that they were told. Accordingly, the researchers prepared "alcoholic" and "non-alcoholic" cocktails as they considered necessary.

The volunteers had to make a video in which they advertised a new brand, after which they were asked to watch the recording and rate themselves for attractiveness, originality and sense of humor. All this, of course, was accompanied by measurements of the level of alcohol in the blood. And then it turned out that for self-esteem it is not at all necessary to drink alcohol: it is enough to think that you are drinking it. Those who believed that they were drinking an alcoholic drink considered themselves the most charming and attractive, although the researchers slipped them a non-alcoholic drink. On the contrary, those convinced of the non-alcoholic nature of their cocktail were not too delighted with themselves, although the scientists mixed a fair amount of alcohol into their drink.

Roughly speaking, a glass in your hand is enough to boost your self-esteem. And what is in it is of secondary importance, as long as it seems like alcohol. This kind of placebo effect is reminiscent of the story of how alcohol advertising exacerbates everyday racism. Psychologists believe that a similar mechanism is at work here: alcohol really does help to loosen up; everyone knows this, and our consciousness simply prepares for such an effect, removing psychological tension.

But there is an unpleasant "but": a person becomes charming and attractive only in his own eyes. Researchers asked strangers to watch "advertisements", and their attitude usually diverged from the participants' self-assessment. After a drink, whether imaginary or real, a person likes himself, but not others.