“Drunk words are sober thoughts.”
Well, it may go even deeper than that.
We’ve all felt that energy you get when you start having a few drinks. The music is playing, the tequila is pouring, the anticipation for what’s about to happen tonight. You’re getting in the zone, about to unleash “drunk you.”
Do you dance on tables? Get really emotional? Get angry and punch somebody? Whatever your “drunk type” is, a new study published in Clinical Psychological Science suggests that your “drunk type” is probably pretty close to your sober personality, although many people would argue otherwise.
The study took 156 students from Purdue and Missouri and analyzed their behaviors during drunk party games. Each student filled out a survey describing their perceived drunk personality, then half of the group was given alcohol and they, both the sober and the drunk students, again rated their drunk personalities.
Drunk people felt way different about their personalities, however the sober group thought that their friends were pretty much the same, even when they were drunk.
“We were surprised to find such a discrepancy between drinkers’ perceptions of their own alcohol-induced personalities and how observers perceived them,” said lead author Rachel Winograd, a psychological scientist at University of Missouri. “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.”
Long story short… if you’re an asshole drunk, you’re probably an asshole sober. If you’re an emotional mess drunk, you’re probably an emotional mess sober. And, all of your friends know it.
