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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36583 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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it is socially useful as a costly signal proving trustworthiness

How? How is it a costly signal and how does it establish trustworthiness?

Exactly what @marinuso said about telling the truth. I will add that in general most people can't drink heavily and still convincingly fake things - even if you have a high tolerance you still get drunk and it's hard to lie about how you're feeling in my experience.

On top of this, people tend to be more open to experience and foolish-acting when drunk. In a healthy, strong social group, sharing embarrassing experiences can help bonding quite a bit. You also share secrets with each other that you wouldn't normally mention.

On top of all this, getting a drink is a good excuse/motivator to get people together in one social space for an activity, with little investment on the event organizer's part.

These are just reasons why drinking is good, not why it is a costly signal of trustworthiness.

Is a social drinker more trustworthy than a completely sober guy? Maybe, but you can make plausible-sounding arguments either way. Maybe the drinker is less likely to have elaborately hidden secrets, but the teetotaler has also demonstrated capacity for self denial and high impulse control, which has to be worth something.

Do teetotalers have higher or lower than average rates of criminality? I would bet lower, but I could be wrong.

I’m not sure, but I suspect “teetotaler” actually includes a weird combination of a few different groups of people for whom the answers will differ:

  1. people who don’t drink for moral reasons

  2. people who don’t drink due to being recovering alcoholics

  3. people who don’t drink due to illness

I would absolutely argue that a social drinker who is drunker than normal is far more trustworthy than a sober guy, at least if you specifically ask the drinker what he believes.

Please make an argument as to how the sober person could answer more honestly?

That seems dubious to me. What portion of most people's drinking involves getting that drunk? We have a lot of mechanisms for signaling and trust; large amounts of alcohol consumption as a way to demonstrate trust seems likely to be limited to frats, gangs, and similar groups.

Depends on the group. Also it doesn't have to be a group activity - two or three people can meet at a group and agree to go get a drink after. That's typically how it happens, and how you form stronger bonds. You break out from a larger group into a smaller subset.

Also, do you really think frats and gangs are the only groups that drink together? I fear you might have a bias against alcohol. Off the top of my head - theater goers, dancers, people who play pool, many people who go to sports game, etc get drunk enough to become more honest than most.

Only ones to drink together? Of course not. Only ones to drink together enough to get drunk, often enough for it to be a significant contributor to trust? Could be. I've been in a lot of contexts where people get drunk (including sports and theater) and can't say trust ever seemed to come from drinking. It came from working together. If anything, excessive drunkenness was associated with less trust ("do they have enough self-control to help the group succeed?", "they did something inappropriate while drunk").

I'm not biased against alcohol. I drink and have gotten drunk. Making such an accusation is a waste of space, and I may as well just accuse you of being biased towards alcohol. Does doing so further the discussion in any way?

large amounts of alcohol consumption as a way to demonstrate trust seems likely to be limited to frats, gangs, and similar groups.

I think this is the fundamental misunderstanding - I see 3-4 drinks to be enough for most people to be more trustworthy. You don't need to get sloshed in order to be more open to telling the truth, in fact if someone is wasted they're probably going to be speaking nonsense. I called you out being biased because I thought you meant nobody besides frats, gangs etc had more than a couple drinks which I saw as blatantly false.

I am still curious as to your thought about sober people being more honest than someone 3-4 drinks in. I hope I've clarified well enough.

Yes, I assumed more than 3-4. That isn't a lot for people who consistently have several drinks at once.

Personally, at 3-4 drinks I certainly will say things I wouldn't be willing to say when sober. Does this reflect increased honesty? Is inhibition due to consideration of social rules dishonest? This seems like a philosophical question; I like to think that who I am sober, including the System 2 considerations, is a more useful picture of "who I am" than drunk-me saying the first thing that comes to mind, like how my choice of hobbies is more reflective of who I am than my reaction to jump scares.

If specifically you mean "are people more willing to say thing they think are true but unpopular" that might be true at 3-4 drinks, but I've been in a lot of situations where people drink that much and it doesn't seem like they say things they wouldn't say normally. Like, I'm more likely to ask someone out, maybe do Karaoke. In my experience I'm not any more likely to say controversial things. It might theoretically have this effect, but as I've said all of the groups I've been in seemed to build trust primarily in other ways.

Drunks and children tell the truth.

OTOH, if you're practiced and can hold your drink better than the other party, now you have the advantage over them.

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