Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: The Bacchus Effect: A Mechanism to Explain Risky Choice Under Intoxication

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Alcohol use is associated with risky behaviors, such as reckless driving, binge eating, and unprotected sex. In addition to the negative health effects of these behaviors, such as sexually transmitted diseases and obesity, there are significant economic costs to society of such risky behavior. For example, drunk driving costs the American public over 100 billion dollars annually, including monetary costs and lost quality of life, with the majority of this cost borne by people other than the drunk driver. Beyond health and financial costs, there are also costs to emotional well-being, such as the regret, guilt or shame felt after drunken behavior. If we want to prevent or reduce these negative outcomes by targeting alcohol use, we must understand alcohol?s role in risky behavior.Conventional wisdom holds that alcohol blinds people to the risks around them, and many millions of tax dollars have been spent to create educational programs based on this premise. The scientific evidence, however, does not unambiguously support the conventional view. Some research has shown that people are no less able to understand risk information when they are drunk than when they are sober and people may even seek out or find some intrinsic value in risk when drunk. If the conventional model is wrong, then many existing curricula waste time and money, and may even risk the lives of those who believe that such strategies will help them to avoid negative situations, and thus fail to take more effective precautions. This research project tests an alternative model of the mechanism by which alcohol affects risky decisions, focusing on emotional and motivational processes involved when people consider both the risks and the benefits of different situations when they are drunk versus when they are sober. We explore several different kinds of behaviors that are commonly linked to alcohol use, including sexual behavior, food choices, and interpersonal negotiation. If our results show that alcohol leads to risky behavior by changing how much people want an attractive option, rather than affecting people?s ability to understand the risks associated with that option, then we would recommend that educational programs switch from highlighting risks to a new focus on undermining benefits.