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Just one drink may be enough to make the average person more willing to physically harm others or act “impure,” by enjoying deviant or bestiality.
This is the conclusion reached by a small, but international team of neuroscientists and psychologists, after testing a carefully selected and diverse group of 329 participants, aged from 18 to 52 years.
Scientists surveyed slightly high test subjects and cold sober control groups across five broad moral fiber categories—care, justice, loyalty, authority, and purity—but only two were tempered by this powerful drink.
“Drunk people want to do unethical things more than sober people,” said one of the study’s authors, echoing time-tested conventional wisdom with the benefit of data.
A new study has found that test subjects who drank alcohol were 4% more likely to think about harming another person or animal and almost 7% more likely to engage in “unclean” acts. Above, Miami police ban alcohol on spring break in 2019
“But we only observed this in two types of behaviors: related to harming others and related to so-called purity violations.”
The study found that people who drank alcohol were 4% more likely to think about harming another person or animal, and about 7% more likely to engage in “unclean” acts.
“Alcohol has been with us for centuries,” said the study’s lead author, a psychologist. Mariola Barozelle-Chachora“It is commonly used in many cultures, but there is surprisingly little research to understand how it affects human morality.”
Baruzil Czachora, an associate professor at Poland’s University of Silesia at the Institute of Psychology in Katowice and a researcher at the Penn Center for Brain Science, hopes to see “more studies on this topic.”
“These studies have huge practical implications,” Baruzil Cachora said. PsyPost.
Barozil-Ciachora and two co-researchers at the University of Silesia in Katowice and the University of Pennsylvania screened a total of 1,079 volunteers before settling on their final group of volunteers. 329 viable participants.
The three study authors then divided the lab participants into three groups: a test group that was given alcohol, a control group that was given nothing, and a placebo group whose drinks were spiked with alcohol to simulate the experience of drinking.
Next, test participants were asked to complete the Moral Foundations Sanctity Scale (MFSS) — an eight-point scale that differs from questionnaires used in previous studies, which did not explicitly examine what lines people would not cross.
The MFSS gave participants a series of ethical decision-making scenarios.
I asked them, for example, if they would “put a pin in the hand of a child you don’t know” in the “care” category.
It asked them whether they would “say no to a friend’s request to help you move into a new apartment, after they helped you move the previous month” to measure “fairness.”
For all questions, people who were both drunk and sober were asked how much money they would need to perform the given task, with eight answers ranging from “I’ll do it for free” (0) to “I’ll do it for a million dollars” to “Never for any money” (8).
Test subjects were asked to complete the Moral Foundations Sanctity Scale (MFSS), which differs from questionnaires used in previous studies that did not explicitly examine what lines people would not cross. For example, whether or not they would “kick a dog in the head hard”
The MFSS gave participants a series of ethical decision-making scenarios. For all questions, drunk and sober participants were asked how much money they would need to perform a task, across eight responses ranging from “I would do it for free” (0) to “Never for any amount of money” (8).
After much statistical calibration, to reduce the chance of false signals, the researchers found that the “experimental” group (the drunks) scored an average of 6.01 on the “care” questions, compared to 6.33 for the control group and 6.03 for the placebo group.
As for issues of moral purity, the control group scored an average of 5.98 while the experimental group scored 5.43.
As an example of one of the MFSS questions for the purity test, the authors asked test subjects to imagine that they were being asked to “attend a performance art piece in which all participants (including me) had to act like animals for 30 minutes.”
The virtual art piece will involve all attendees “crawling naked and urinating on the stage.”
The researchers assumed that there was no change in the answers regarding It may be that justice, loyalty, and authority are because these ethics tend to refer to core values.
“These foundations are typically the ones that matter most to people,” the researchers wrote in their paper published last August in the peer-reviewed journal. Psychopharmacology“As previous studies suggested”
“Finally, we conducted an exploratory analysis to identify the items that stood out most among participants,” the authors noted.
For the care category, the question most divided among participants was whether or not they would kick a dog in the head hard.
For the purity category, the most divisive question was whether the test subject would “receive a transfusion of a pint of disease-free, compatible blood from a convicted child molester.”
(Tags for translation) Daily Mail