We tend to think of alcohol as primarily a disinhibitor, but this can’t really explain its varying effects. Sometimes it seems to make us loud and boisterous, sometimes quiet and contemplative, sometimes sad and depressed, along with all the shades and combinations of these, and other emotions.

Similarly psychologists have found that alcohol can have all sorts of counter-intuitive effects. Studies have even shown that after drinking people can become less aggressive and less likely to engage in risky sexual behaviours. Doesn’t sound like alcohol does it? So, how can we understand and explain all these different states?

Spiked drinks

Folk psychology (and research) tells us that some of the varying effects of alcohol come from culture and individual differences. There are violent drunks, depressive drunks, sleepy drunks, amorous drunks and all the rest.

Culture and social norms also pitch in with their own influences. We have certain expectations about how alcohol will shift us into parallel states of consciousness and, hey presto, so it does. One study gave participants a fizzy drink and told them it contained vodka (Assefi & Garry, 2003). They were soon acting drunk, complete with inflated egos, despite having had nothing more toxic than tonic water.

The problem with the expectations explanation is that we’re not reliably shifted into the same parallel state of consciousness. If culture and personality mostly explained the psychological effects of alcohol, then how come we can have quite different experiences while drinking?

So clearly alcohol’s effects must depend on the exact situation in which we drink. But which features of a situation nudge our feelings and behaviour in one or other direction, one time towards depressive introspection, say, and another time towards joyous extraversion?

Alcohol myopia

According to a growing body of evidence collected over the last three or more decades, people’s Jekyll and Hyde behaviour while drinking can be understood by a simple idea which has some intriguing ramifications.

The alcohol myopia model says that drink makes our attentional system short-sighted and the more we drink, the more short-sighted it becomes. With more alcohol our brains become less and less able to process peripheral cues and more focused on what is right in front of us. It’s this balance between what is right in front of us and what we don’t notice around the edges that determines how alcohol affects us in different situations.

Here are a few effects which imbibers will recognise immediately:

• An ego boost: when people drink, they often feel better about themselves. This may be because the attentional short-sightedness induced by alcohol makes all our shortcomings float away and so we feel closer to our ideal selves. This is probably one of the reasons it is so potentially addictive, it is self-actualisation in bottle form.
• Real worries can get worse: if we’ve had a bad day and we sit quietly with a drink, alcohol can make it worse because all the peripheral cues which are potential distractors are cut out and all we see are our problems.
• Pleasure in the moment: the flip-side of this attentional focus is that if, while drinking, we are doing something enjoyable, we find it easier to ignore any nagging doubts or stray worries wandering through our minds. We can be totally in the moment listening to music, watching sports or talking with a good friend.
• In the zone: it’s even possible that for some types of task it may increase performance as we let go of our insecurities. Perhaps that’s why so many writers wrote with a glass of whisky at their side.

More than just disinhibition

The fact that the effect of alcohol on the human mind is more than just disinhibition is supported by studies showing how, when environmental cues are manipulated, alcohol can have counter-intuitive effect. Here are three neat studies:

1. Alcohol can lower levels of aggression: participants were asked to administer electric shocks to a fictitious opponent (Giancola and Corman, 2007). Those who were intoxicated and moderately distracted from the task were less aggressive than participants who hadn’t been drinking. In certain circumstances, then, alcohol can make drunk people less aggressive.
2. Alcohol can induce less risky sexual behaviour: people in a nightclub were asked whether they would engage in unprotected sex (MacDonald et al., 2000). Those who had been drinking indicated they would be less likely to do so when they had the following message stamped on their hand: AIDS KILLS.
3. Alcohol can increase anxiety about giving a public talk: intoxicated people about to give a public presentation were more nervous about their upcoming ordeal than those who hadn’t been drinking (Steele & Josephs, 1988). This is the complete reverse of the received wisdom.

So the effects of alcohol come down to how our minds interact with the situation when our attentional systems have started operating with a kind of tunnel vision.

Free from distraction

This model doesn’t explain everything and it would be wrong to say that psychologists agree that it does. But what the alcohol myopia model does provide is a very intuitive and easily understood way of thinking about how alcohol affects us, for better and worse.

The next time you have a drink, see what you think: does your attention narrow to what’s right in front of you? One of the reasons so many people enjoy its effects when socialising is that it allows us to live in the moment, without distraction, focusing purely on the conversation we’re having together, freed from our own negative self-evaluations and the intrusive minutiae of everyday life.

While alcohol may well cause disinhibition under certain circumstances, there is more going on than just that. Attentional tunnel vision provides a useful way of thinking about the many and varied effects of the demon drink.

Which of these would you say sounds like the more dangerous food additive: Hnegripitrom or Magnalroxate?

The majority of people say Hnegripitrom sounds more dangerous. It turns out that the word ‘Magnalroxate’ is easier to think about than ‘Hnegripitrom’, probably because it’s more pronounceable, and people equate simplicity with safety (actually both words are made up).

This is one example of psychological research on meta-cognition: thoughts about other thoughts. Whether or not something is easy to think about—cognitive fluency—is one important type of meta-cognition, with all sorts of benefits accruing to things that are easily processed.

Here are 8 of my favourite studies on cognitive fluency, showing just how much can be explained by the feeling that something is easy to think about (or otherwise).

1. Complex writing makes you look stupid

Many of us did it in school: tried to impress teachers with fancy language and convoluted sentences, assuming it would make us look clever. As we soon discovered, though, most people can’t carry it off.

This has been tested by a study that manipulated text complexity to see how readers would judge the author’s intelligence. It found that as the text became more complicated, readers gave lower estimates of the author’s intelligence (Oppenheimer, 2005).

So if you want to be perceived as more intelligent (and who doesn’t?) keep your writing simple. This chimes perfectly with the standard advice given to wannabe writers. Sadly simplicity can be a lot harder to achieve than complexity.

(Note: the context of this study was students judging other students’ essays. This study might not extend to other types of writing and other types of readers.)

2. Difficult names are dangerous

As we’ve already seen, people assume that things which are difficult to pronounce are also risky. Song and Schwarz (2009) found that the fictional food additive Hnegripitrom was considered 1 point more dangerous on a 1 to 7 scale than Magnalroxate.

The same effect was found for fictitious amusement park rides. A ride apparently called ‘Chunta’ was thought much safer than the relatively dangerous sounding ‘Vaiveahtoishi’. (I assume participants didn’t know the slang ‘chunder’, or these results might have been different!)

3. Foreigners are more difficult to think about

So names that are difficult to pronounce seem to have negative connotations? That doesn’t bode well for migrants whose names are unfamiliar in their adopted countries.

Thinking more generally, Rubin et al. (2010) wondered whether people who live in one country, but come from another, are plain awkward to think about and that part of the well-documented societal bias against them stems from this fact.

In one experiment participants were asked to judge the characters of imaginary people, some who lived in the country in which they were born, and some who had moved abroad. Standard sources of bias against people with foreign names were removed (e.g. outgroup bias) by the way they set up the experiment.

The results showed that people who had moved from one country to another were difficult to think about and so participants had rated their characters more negatively.

4. Buy shares with fluent names

Before we leave names behind, check out this neat study which suggests a way to increase your stock market profits. Alter and Oppenheimer (2006) wondered if companies with pronounceable ticker codes, like GOOG for Google, will benefit from the fluency effect by trading more profitably.

They tested this idea using real stock market data, controlling for industry sector and the possibility that more profitable companies might have simpler names. After analysing the data they found that if you invest in companies with pronounceable stock ticker codes you’ll make 10% more profit after just one day’s trading.

Given the current economic gloom perhaps renaming the whole stock exchange wouldn’t be a bad idea. Forget FTSE, NYSE and TSE, let’s call them LILY, ETHAN and MIKI (some work to be done on what these stand for…).

5. But…hesitate and they’ll remember

Right, enough fantasising about using fluency for stock market riches. Perhaps in some areas there is an advantages to be had from a lack of fluency?

Most people’s speech is littered with, errr, disfluencies—that’s just how people speak. As you’d expect, research finds that people who speak fluently are perceived as more knowledgeable and more intelligent. So that’s more points for fluency. But one study has found that when a speaker hesitates the word that comes out of their mouth next is better remembered (Corley et al., 2007).

Perhaps there was method in George W. Bush’s speech-making?

6. People buy fluent products

Needless to say people have wondered if this cognitive fluency lark could be used to make people part with their cashola. It can. Novemsky et al. (2007) manipulated the fluency of a product by listing its features in either an easy or hard to read font. Easy to read fonts doubled the number of people willing to purchase the product.

You might well ask what kind of an idiotic company would use an illegible font for their product features, but I’ve seen it done. Still, apply this principle more generally and it leads to the conclusion that fluent products are more profitable. Just think about companies like Apple which have raised cognitive fluency to a consumerist religion.

There’s a certain type of geek that sneers at ease of use, but that attitude is plain wrong. Look at the evolution of just about any consumer technology: it starts out almost impossible to use and ends up in the hands of your grandma. This is the effect of cognitive fluency writ large across the marketplace.

7. Fluency gives us pleasure

Things that are easy to process give us a momentary burst of pleasure. When people look at objects which are easy to pick up, they produce tiny smiles compared with when they are shown objects which are difficult to pick up (Cannon et al., 2009—measured using electromyography). Sensorimotor fluency gives people a tiny twinge of pleasure.

Extrapolate this to websites, products or whatever matters to you and the power of simplicity should be obvious. People like to feel pleasure almost as much as they want to avoid pain.

(Now can someone please tell that to the masochists who dream up mobile phone tariffs?)

8. Fluency allows effortless thinking

Fluency also affects the way we make decisions.

Broadly speaking our brains have two systems for reasoning. The system we are consciously aware of is slow and analytical, while the one that operates below the level of conscious awareness is quick, effortless and automatic. That’s our intuition.

When thinking about something that is easy to process, we tend to reason quickly and effortlessly (Alter et al., 2007). This isn’t necessarily a good or a bad thing, but one standard effect of automatic thinking is that we tend to go for the default option.

On the other hand disfluency kicks the mind into an analytical reasoning mode, making it more likely our decision will go off-piste.

Keep it simple, clever clogs

All of this seems straightforward enough, once you know about it, yet it can be difficult to put into practice. People are afraid of looking stupid and automatically assume that if they make something complex, others will assume it is better. In many ways this couldn’t be further from the truth.

None of this is an argument for dumbing down, for lowest common denominators or for pandering. Paradoxically complexity is often quick and easy while simplicity takes time.

Like mathematicians searching for the shortest formula to describe a complex phenomenon, we should all be obsessed with simplicity, because in simplicity lies beauty and the human mind, as we’ve just seen, finds it difficult to resist.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could just spontaneously and automatically exercise self-control, without all that painful back-and-forth battle with ourselves?

Just automatically resist that cake and choose the apple; or suddenly find ourselves out jogging without resorting to self-blackmail; or effortlessly write more articles for our websites (bit of a personal one there!).

Unfortunately so often temptation wins. And experiments show that when we are run down from exercising self-discipline all day, we become even more likely to give in to temptation.

Apple or candy bar?

I’ve previously covered research here suggesting that self-control can be increased by thinking abstractly about our goals. This suggests we should see our actions as just one part of a larger plan, rather than focusing on the details of what we’re doing. The power of abstract thinking may offer a way for us to increase our self-control without really trying.

But how does thinking abstractly about our goals increase our self-control? In a recent article published in Psychological Science, Fujita and Han (2009) wondered if our unconscious mind is somehow pitching in to help out. They used an implicit association test as a way of measuring people’s unconscious thoughts about eating either an apple or a tempting candy bar.

Before taking this test people were put into either an abstract or concrete mode of thinking. Participants were split into two groups with each asked to think about maintaining good personal relationships, but in different ways. One group thought about why we need to maintain good relationships (abstract, high-level) while the other focused on how we maintain good relationships (concrete, low-level).

As you can see, for the purposes of this experiment, the reason participants were thinking abstractly didn’t matter so much. That’s because when we think abstractly about one thing, we tend to carry on thinking in an abstract mode about anything else that’s put in front of us, including the choice between an apple and a candy bar.

Automatic, unconscious self-control

The results showed that, when participants were thinking concretely, they tended to unconsciously see candy bars in a positive light and apples in a negative light. But this was reversed when participants were thinking abstractly. Just as predicted, abstract thinking automatically made people unconsciously think of candy bars as the devil’s own food.

To back this up they asked participants in the two conditions whether they would like an apple or a candy bar, right now. They found that when participants were thinking in a concrete low-level way, they chose the apple over the candy bar only 50% of the time. But when they were thinking abstractly this percentage shot up to 76%. Not bad for such a simple manipulation.

So it seems you can bolster resistance to temptation by thinking abstractly about the goal you want to obtain because it causes your mind to automatically associate temptations with negativity. Hey presto, more self-control and thank you unconscious mind.

Why not try applying this to whatever you are finding difficult to achieve?

Back in the 60s and 70s, before the sexual revolution had really taken hold, the standard dating advice for women was play hard to get. In some quarters it still is.

Like the Roman poet Ovid 2,000 years earlier, social scientists in the 1960s accepted the cultural lore that women could increase their desirability by being coy. When interviewed, men seemed to agree: they said that hard to get women were probably more popular, beautiful and had better personalities.

Unfortunately every time psychologists used an experiment to test the idea that playing hard to get is a good dating strategy, their results didn’t make any sense. At least not until 1973 when Elaine Walster and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin finally hit upon a method that teased out the subtleties (Walster et al., 1973).

Here’s what they did.

Easy for you to get

Single young men were given a folder containing details of five fictitious single women with quite similar descriptions. They were told the computer had matched them and that three of the women had already seen and rated their own details and those of four other rival suitors.

This was all a ruse, however, to set up a series of experimental conditions related to how hard to get each of the women appeared to be. Each woman fell into one of the following categories:

• Easy to get: had apparently given high ratings to all five men, including the participant.
• Selectively hard to get: liked the participant but not the other four men.
• Always hard to get: didn’t like any of the men, including the participant.
• No information: there was no information provided about two of the women.

Each man saw the women’s ratings, including of themselves, then chose one to date.  One woman was far and away more popular than the others, and it had nothing to do with the small variations in their descriptions:

• Easy to get: 5
• Selectively hard to get: 42
• Always hard to get: 6
• No information: 11 and 7 for the two women for which no information was provided.

The woman who was apparently selectively hard to get, i.e. easy for you but hard for everyone else was the runaway winner for the men. Not only that but men thought the selectively hard to get woman would have all the advantages of the easy to get woman with none of the drawbacks of the hard to get woman. They thought she would be popular, warm and easygoing, but not demanding and difficult.

Forbidden fruit

We have to be careful what conclusions we draw from this experiment: crucially it didn’t involve anyone meeting face to face, or address what happens when men play hard to get, plus it only looked at heterosexual matches. But a subsequent study on speed-dating has also found that showing selective interest is the best strategy (Eastwick et al., 2007).

Despite these drawbacks, once you’ve heard the results it’s difficult to imagine how it could have turned out any other way—after all, everyone wants to feel special.

So this experiment suggests that playing hard to get only works in the sense that it signals selectivity. But for the person you are after, you should be easy to get because otherwise they’ll assume you’re hard work.

In the light of this experiment we can remix Ovid’s quote to:

“Easy things are tempting, but only if they are forbidden to others.”

There’s a maxim to live by.