Ed West Ed West

Does alcohol make us more right-wing?

Although I wrote in my last post that social media makes people miserable, Twitter is also a fantastic resource for acquiring knowledge from experts and specialists in different areas. One of my favourite accounts is Rolf Degen, who daily tweets a number of scientific studies into human behaviour. Just before Christmas he linked to a story concerning the impact of alcohol consumption on politics, suggesting that booze makes us more right-wing. According to the paper ‘alcohol strips away complex reasoning to reveal the default state of the mind’ and drunkenness therefore encourages ‘low-effort, automatic thought’ and so promotes political conservatism. Similarly, as this study of the anti-anxiety drug lorazepam shows‘anxiety exerts a general inhibitory effect on harmful acts toward other humans regardless of whether the motivation for those harmful acts is selfish or utilitarian.’ People, once loosened up by alcohol, are more willing to punish wrongdoers, and certainly drink is long associated with violence and in particular communal mob violence. 

Personally this jars with my own experience; since conservatism is associated with higher levels of fear – conservatives’ brains perceive threats more than those of liberals – I think I tend to become more liberal as I drink more. Of course in the morning, when I wake up in bed still wearing all my clothes and my mouth tasting like sandpaper, that’s a different matter.

Or perhaps it’s because social liberalism is more acceptable in polite society, and many of us are more right-wing than we let on. Public liberalism may be partly maintained for sexual selection reasons: since women find the qualities behind liberalism – generosity and compassion – attractive and high-status, many men exaggerate these aspects of their character. One of the reasons that most of the men caught up in #MeToo dragnet are on the left is that the vast majority of young women prefer socially liberal men, and so if you are a player or a predator then that’s the pose you will adopt.

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