Have you ever picked up an 8 out of 10 at 2 a.m. only to wake up with a 2 out of 10 at 8 a.m.? If so, you should be comforted by the knowledge you are suffering from a scientifically documented phenomenon — beer goggles.
There’s been a surprising amount of research done on the subject. Papers with titles like “Beer goggles: blood alcohol concentration in relation to attractiveness ratings for unfamiliar opposite sex faces in naturalistic settings”, and “Whales Tales, Dog Piles, and Beer Goggles: An Ethnographic Case Study of Fraternity Life” appear in peer-reviewed journals. Even the Mythbusters have weighed in, subjecting three team members to judging random portraits while sober, buzzed and drunk.
No matter the specific experimental setup, the result always agrees with what everyone already knows to be true: Drinking alcohol can lower your standards.
In one study, researchers from Australia’s Bond University went to local bars and parties and asked students to rate a stack of portraits by attractiveness. The students were tested for blood alcohol content and grouped by BAC, and their average scores were tallied. Overall, subjects with moderate to high BAC perceived the pictures to be more attractive than their sober counterparts.
Aside from making studying abroad in Australia sound like an even better idea, these researchers obviously didn’t make any earth-shattering discoveries. They set out to show drinking makes you more generous with those around you, and they succeeded.
But let’s be honest. The guy who got a grant for this study approved may in fact be a genius, but he’s not exactly curing cancer.
Another team, operating out of London’s prestigious Roehampton University (why does all of this research happen so far away?) tried to find out what exactly causes this impaired judgment.
Their experiment focused on one effect alcohol has on the brain — loss of facial appreciation. Human beings have large portions of their brain devoted to analyzing and interpreting faces. As a social species, we have a lot to lose and a lot to gain by correctly decoding subtle emotional cues in people’s faces.
Alcohol can obviously make these sorts of delicate operations basically impossible, but it can also affect you in a more unusual way. According to this study, drinking alcohol can affect your brain’s ability to tell whether or not a person’s face is symmetrical.
Other studies have shown facial symmetry is one of the few truly universal indicators of attractiveness. No matter a person’s age, sex, creed or race, we are all more likely to prefer a symmetrical face to an unsymmetrical one.
Keeping this in mind, the researchers from Roehampton collected 20 pairs of portraits of similar attractiveness and then digitally altered half of them to be slightly asymmetrical. They also randomly modified half of another stack of 20 pictures and went out for a night at the pub.
There they asked people who had been drinking to pick the more attractive picture from each pair, and then to determine whether the other 20 mug shots were symmetrical or not.
Most of the sober participants preferred the symmetric faces and were able to determine whether a given face was symmetrical or not. People who had been drinking were less picky and had considerable difficulty determining if a face was symmetrical. Interestingly enough, inebriated men were better at identifying symmetry than inebriated women.
Obviously, symmetry is not the only reason beer goggles work. Research has shown alcohol consumption can stimulate the release of dopamine, the hormone governing sexual arousal and lust.
Maybe it’s dopamine, maybe it’s symmetry, maybe people just get desperate as the night comes to a close. But whatever the cause, remember beer goggles are real, and they aren’t picky.
Andrew Shockey is a 19-year-old biological engineering sophomore from Baton Rouge. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_Ashockey.
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Contact Andrew Shockey at [email protected]