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Almost all of us had to regret in the morning about what we did or said the night before, "on a drunken head." Sometimes it seems that in a normal state we would never do this. However, alcohol has a depressing effect on neurons, primarily those involved in control, concentration, and empathy.
We understand other people worse and often have worse contact with them, but alcohol does not change a person's ethical views: it only slows down and "lowers the bar" of what is available. Such conclusions were reached by the authors of a study published in the journal Psychopharmacology. For this, Kathryn Francis and her colleagues from the British University of Bradford conducted an unusual experiment.
Psychologists gave healthy adult volunteers to drink vodka and observed how their evaluations and views changed as they became intoxicated. Thus, the subjects were shown portraits of people, asking them to guess the emotions experienced by the faces. As you might expect, comprehension worsened the more the man drank.
In addition, scientists investigated changes in the moral judgments of volunteers by asking them standard tasks, such as the well-known trolley problem, in which they are asked to solve a complex ethical dilemma. Unlike empathy, there were no changes in this area: even when drunk, subjects generally maintained their usual ethical views and norms. And if, in the same trolley problem, a person preferred to kill one to save five, then, having drunk quite a bit of alcohol, she responded in the same way.
All this, according to psychologists, shows that it is in vain that we consider a drunk "a completely different person": personal characteristics remain unchanged, and the line between good and evil remains in its usual place. Another thing is that alcohol impairs the brain's ability to control itself and its behavior — and provides a convenient excuse in the morning.
