Alcohol is really not an excuse for bad behavior – research reveals that you are still the same person after a drink

Many of us experience this feeling of awakening, headaches, struggling to remember what we said and done after the extra drink the night before. And then suddenly, the memories come back strongly.

Alcohol inhibits us, forces us to say and do things that we would not ignore. People will often drink to gain "Dutch courage" in a demanding situation. Many of us may understand the lure of having a drink before a blind date or a social event – this can help us calm down and build trust. This is because alcohol has a depressive effect that makes us more relaxed.

Of course, the effects of alcohol are not all positive. We all adopted nicknames for the characters we become after a few drinks. Perhaps you are the "happy drunkard," or maybe you have a reputation for being an "aggressive drunkard" who takes all the wrong direction after a pint.

The relationship between alcohol and antisocial behavior is well documented – anecdotally and as part of research. Many arguments and fights come from someone who has had one too many. Scientists believe that we behave this way when we are drunk because we misinterpret social situations and lose our sense of empathy. Essentially, once we begin to brood and stumble, our ability to understand or share the emotions of others also disappears.

Make your decisions in a state of drunkenness

If someone did something wrong while he was under the influence of alcohol, we tend to give him a card "get out of jail" rather than the hold responsible for his actions. We also extend these excuses to ourselves.

But in our research, we have tried to paint a clearer picture of the relationship between alcohol consumption, empathy and moral behavior. Ultimately, although alcohol use may affect our empathy and cause us to respond inappropriately to the emotions and reactions of others, it does not necessarily change our moral standards or the principles we use to distinguish between this. who is right and what is wrong.

In a recent experiment, we gave participants vodka shots, then measured their empathy and moral decisions. We presented images showing various people expressing emotions to our participants. After receiving a higher dose of vodka, people began to respond inappropriately to these emotional displays, signaling that they felt positively about sad and negative faces about happy faces. The more people were intoxicated, the more their empathy was altered – drinking a few drinks weakened their ability to understand and share the emotions of others.

But did that have an effect on their morality?

People told us what they thought they were doing in moral dilemmas, and then looked at what they actually did to simulate a moral dilemma in virtual reality. Think about what you could do in one of these situations:

A fleeing cart goes to five construction workers who can not hear it. You are on a bridge between the approaching wagon and the workers. In front of you is a very big stranger. If you push this stranger on the rails below, their great mass will stop the cart. This person will be killed but the five construction workers will be saved. Would you do it?

Although alcohol may have altered the empathy of our participants, it did not affect the way they judged these moral situations or their behavior. If someone chose to push the person off the bridge to save more lives while he was sober, he was doing the same thing when he was drunk. If people refused to sacrifice the life of the person in the same situation because they thought that killing was wrong, whatever the consequences, they did the same when they were drunk.

It turns out that, although we may believe that alcohol changes our personality, this is not the case. You are still the same person after a drink – your current moral sense has remained intact. So, while alcohol can affect how we interpret and understand the emotions of others, we can not blame our immoral behaviors for alcohol.

Drunken has the same moral compass. And you are therefore responsible for your moral and immoral actions, whether you have drunk a few drinks or not.