As forwarded to the “There’s a health message in here somewhere” department:
Reuters has reported on a French study has found that customers of bars that play loud music drink more quickly and in fewer gulps.
The study, published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, found that turning up the music spurred drinkers to down a glass of beer about three minutes more quickly.
To gauge the effect of sound levels on drinking, the team spent three Saturday nights visiting two bars, where they observed 40 men aged between 18 and 25 drinking beer.
It was tough, but someone had to do it. It’s the kind of brave thing we social researchers do, you know…
“We have shown that environmental music played in a bar is associated with an increase in drinking,” Nicolas Gueguen, a behavioural sciences researcher at the University of Southern Brittany in France, who led the study, said in a statement.
With help from the bars’ owners, the team turned the music up and down and then recorded how much and how fast people drank. The men did not know they were being observed.
Louder music spurred more consumption, with the average number of drinks ordered by patrons rising to 3.4 drinks from 2.6 drinks, Gueguen found. The time taken to drink a beer fell to an average 11.45 minutes from 14.51 minutes.
The researchers acknowledged some limitations to their study, for example that the experiment was on a small scale and could not be applied to every bar.
And the fact that some of the female researchers were distracted because they were wearing makeup and smiling…*
They said it was not clear why louder music appeared to increase alcohol consumption but said it might make conversation more difficult, forcing people to drink more and talk less.
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* Guéguen, Nicolas, 2008. Brief Report: The Effects of Women’s Cosmetics on Men’s Approach: An Evaluation in a Bar. North American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 10 Issue 1, p221-227 . Findings: “The number of men’s solicitations and the latency of the first solicitation were used as dependent variables. Results showed that the makeup condition was associated with a higher number of male solicitations and a shorter latency between the arrival of the confederates in the bar and the first courtship solicitation of a male.”
Gueguen, Nicolas; Fischer-Lokou, Jacques; Lefebvre, Liv; Lamy, Lubomir, 2008. Women’s eye contact and men’s later interest: two field experiements. Perceptual & Motor Skills, Feb2008, Vol. 106 Issue 1, p63-66. Findings: “In Exp. 1, a female confederate established eye-contact of 3 sec. or 1 sec. with a man when entering a bar. Duration of returned glance was the dependent variable. Analysis showed mean duration of the return glance was statistically shorter in the 1-sec. condition. In Exp. 2, the confederate made eye contact with a man and looked at him less than 1 sec., 2 sec., or 4 sec. The presence versus absence of smile was the dependent variable. Longer duration of eye contact was associated with an increase of smiling.”
