Drinking more alcohol may make you less empathetic, according to a study that measured empathetic responses and moral judgment among people at different levels of intoxication.
Kathryn Francis at the University of Plymouth in the UK and her colleagues recruited 48 people aged 18 to 42, and split them into three groups which drank either one of two strengths of vodka mixed with lemonade or a placebo of lemonade with alcohol sprayed around the edge of the glass.
They measured the blood alcohol level of each group. Those who drank the high-strength drink – which contained twice as much alcohol as the low strength – reached a median of 0.03 per cent. Those in the low-alcohol group had a median of 0.01 per cent. For comparison, the drink-drive limit in England and Wales is 0.08 per cent.
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After 20 minutes, each person did a series of tests. In the first, they were shown pictures of people with sad, neutral or happy expressions and were asked to say how they felt about each. People in the high-alcohol group reported feeling more positively towards sad faces and more negatively towards happy faces. These inappropriate responses support the theory that alcohol impairs components of empathy, the team says.
The participants were then presented with images of painful situations – for example, a person cutting vegetables with a knife and also slicing their hand – and asked to rate the intensity of pain they thought the person was experiencing. Alcohol dosage didn’t affect ability to appropriately rate pain.
The final test was similar to the famous Trolley problem. The participants wore virtual reality headsets and were placed in the so-called footbridge dilemma, where they had a choice of sacrificing one person to derail a train headed for a footbridge with five people on it. Lowered empathy would suggest that someone would make the more utilitarian choice – doing the most good for the most people and sending one person to their doom to save five.
But alcohol consumption didn’t appear to affect moral judgment, with people in all three groups choosing to save the most people possible. “This may suggest that it is not only the un-empathic facets of traits such as psychopathy that drive utilitarian moral decision-making but perhaps other facets,” the team writes.
Psychopharmacology
