The research showed that alcohol doesn’t really have the power to change your personality. Rather, you are pretty much the same person when you’re drunk as when you’re sober – despite how hard that is to believe. For the study, researchers at the University of Missouri and Purdue University studied the personalities of 156 people while drinking and while sober. The goal was to determine whether or not “drunk personalities” were actually real.
Half of the participants were given alcohol and then brought in some sober friends to play games with. Afterward, both the drinkers and their friends filled out surveys about personality changes. The drinkers assumed they were acting much differently, but their sober friends didn’t report the same.
According to University of Missouri social psychologist Rachel Winograd, the notable “personality shift” is actually a result of feeling more extroverted.
“We were surprised to find such a discrepancy between drinkers’ perceptions of their own alcohol-induced personalities and how observers perceived them,” explained Winograd. “Participants reported experiencing differences in all factors of the Five Factor Model of personality, but extraversion was the only factor robustly perceived to be different across participants in alcohol and sober conditions.”
So, why do people feel so different while drunk? It really comes down to the placebo effect. As Awesome Jelly reports, our brains have been trained to believe that booze is a type of social lubricant. However, you are still you! This is the case even after your 5th beer or 3rd shot. It’s just your brain that convinces you are different.