Gladwell on Drinking

I don’t know how he does it. Once again, Malcolm Gladwell has managed to sound original, insightful, and entirely common sense.

Turns out we misunderstand the effects of drinking: it doesn’t simply remove inhibitions.

Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the thing in the background disappear. That’s why drinking makes you think you are attractive when the world thinks otherwise: the alcohol removes the little constraining voice from the outside world that normally keeps our self-assesments in check. Drinking relaxes the man watching football because the game is front and center, and alcohol makes every secondary consideration fade away. But in a quiet bar his problems are front and center—and every potentially comforting or mitigating thought recedes. Drunkenness is not disinhibition. Drunkenness is myopia.

Drinkers get loud and rowdy because they respond to signals sent “by the pulsing music, by the crush of people, by the dimmed light, by the countless movies and television shows that say that young men in a bar with pulsing music on a Friday night have permission to be loud and rowdy.” This means that intoxication in a different setting, with different rules and different expectations, presents very differently.

The article recounts several fascinating experiments and case studies that demonstrate this effect. Gladwell concludes that our efforts to “moralize, medicalize, and legalize” alcohol abuse are ultimately less effective than providing “a positive and constructive example of how to drink.”

Read the piece here (abstract only without subscription, unfortunately) and check out more of Malcolm Gladwell’s work here (including full articles, 1996-2009). He really doesn’t need the plug—I already seethe with jealousy at this guy’s career—but the writing’s just so good.

Look for future admiring posts: Gladwell on underdogs, Gladwell on invention, Gladwell on entrepreneurs…