- Alcohol increases immoral behavior.
- Tested moral categories.
- Purity and harm implications.
A single whisky shot has the potential to increase an average individual’s inclination towards physical harm towards others or engaging in unethical or animalistic behavior.
A small international team of neuroscientists and psychologists reached this conclusion after evaluating 329 participants, whose ages ranged from 18 to 52. They meticulously selected these participants to represent diversity.
Despite examining slightly inebriated control groups and slightly inebriated test subjects in five broad categories of moral values—care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity—alcohol only loosened two of these categories.
Moral Categories and Alcohol’s Influence
“One of the study’s authors reaffirmed that drunk people are more likely to engage in immoral behavior than sober individuals,” bolstering data-supported conventional wisdom.
We observed only two types of behaviour: harming others and “purity violations.”
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The study found that subjects who had consumed whisky were nearly 7 percent more likely to commit ‘impure’ acts and 4 percent more likely to contemplate harming another person or animal.
The study’s lead author, psychologist Mariola Paruzel-Czachura, said, “Many societies have consumed alcohol for generations. However, researchers have surprisingly conducted little research to determine its impact on human morality.”
Paruzel-Czachura, an associate professor in the Institute of Psychology at the Polish University of Silesia in Katowice and a scholar at the Penn Brain Science Centre of the University of Pennsylvania, desires “more studies on this topic.”
Implications and Future Research
“The practical implications of these studies are enormous,” Paruzel-Czachura told PsyPost.
Before selecting 329 viable participants, Paruzel-Czachura and her two co-investigators from the University of Silesia in Katowice and UPenn evaluated a total of 1,079 volunteers.
The three study authors subsequently divided their laboratory subjects into three distinct groups: one control group, which received no alcohol, one test group, whose beverages were subtly spritzed with alcohol to induce intoxication, and a placebo group, which received no alcohol.
Participants next completed the Moral Foundations Sacredness Scale (MFSS), an eight-point scale that varies from past study questionnaires that did not particularly examine limits people are afraid to cross.
The MFSS presented a succession of moral decision-making scenarios to the participants.
For ‘care’, students were asked if they would “stick a pin into the palm of a child you don’t know.”
Research on ‘Fairness’
To assess “fairness,” they requested participants to decline a friend’s request for assistance in relocating to a new flat, one month after helping with their own move.
Both inebriated and sober subjects answered questions about the financial investment required to complete the task. Each respondent provided one of the following eight values: “I would do it for free” (0), “I would do it for one million dollars,” or “I would never do it for any amount of money” (8).
To reduce the likelihood of false signals, the researchers determined, following extensive statistical calibration, that the ‘experimental’ (inebriated) group achieved an average score of 6.01 on ‘care’ questions, while the control group scored 6.33 and the placebo group scored 6.03.
The controls scored 5.98 on moral integrity questions, while the experimental group scored 5.43.
Uncovering ‘Purity Violations’
As an example of an MFSS question used for assessing purity, the authors asked their subjects to envision themselves as participants in a performance art piece where all attendees (including themselves) are required to behave in an animalistic manner for a duration of 30 minutes.
The hypothetical artwork would involve them and all audience members “crawling around naked and urinating on stage.”
The researchers suggested that these principles typically represent fundamental values, attributing the static responses to fairness, loyalty, and authority.
“As suggested by previous studies,” the researchers wrote in their August publication in the peer-reviewed journal Psychopharmacology, “these foundations are typically the most important for people.”
The authors concluded, “We then performed an exploratory analysis to determine which items distinguished the participants the most.”
The most contentious question was whether participants would “firmly kick a dog in the head” under care.
The most contentious inquiry in the purity category concerned whether the test subject would receive a blood transfusion consisting of one pint of compatible, disease-free blood obtained from a convicted child abuser.
