In popular thought, alcohol has been invested with a great number of varied effects. It has been suggested that these effects are, in part, a function of beliefs about the power of alcohol to change the drinker A review of the data on causal beliefs about alcohol and social behavior indicates that such beliefs are common and that the general public shares a number of beliefs about alcohol as a cause of crime and disinhibited behavior Several issues are discussed, including the role of individual differences in sex and drinking habits, and the dichotomy of desirable and undesirable behavioral effects. It is suggested that these beliefs function in maintaining drinking behavior and in contributing to alcohol's potential for excusing untoward behavior.Sometimes, under the spell of John Barleycorn, the most frightful things were done--things that shocked even my case-hardened s o u l . . , is there a greater maker of madness of all sorts than John Barleycorn? ---Jack London, 1913London, /1981, 152 [Alcohol is] a chemical which enhances even for a time social communion and good fellowship, which wipes out social distinetion and difference, which has become the symbol of good fellowship . . . It releases exuberance, good fellowship, and friendliness, all of which are exceedingly valuable to man.- -Myerson, 1940, pp. 19, 20

Can alcohol make people more helpful, and if so, how? We hypothesized that alcohol would increase helping when, if the person were sober, the helping response would be under high inhibitory conflict--that is, when it would be affected by strong instigating and inhibiting pressures. Alcohol's damage to inhibitory processing should then allow instigating pressures to have more influence on the response, increasing helping. We expected that under low inhibitory conflict, when either or both of these response pressures would be weak under sobriety, alcohol would have little effect on helping. In two experiments we examined this reasoning. In Study 1, a mild dose of alcohol increased helping among high-conflict subjects pressured to help with a task they did not like, but did not increase helping among low-conflict subjects who either liked the task or were weakly pressured to help. In Study 2, a somewhat stronger dose of alcohol increased helping among all high-conflict subjects pressured to help with an undesirable task, yet again had no effect among low-conflict subjects weakly pressured to help. These studies provided an experimental demonstration of the role of inhibitory response conflict in mediating alcohol's social effects, and show that this process generalizes to prosocial behavior. Additional evidence from both experiments helped to rule out alternative explanations concerning drinking expectancies, alcohol's ability to enhance mood, and its ability to make the task more bearable.

Based on recent evidence supporting the assumption that cognitive dissonance is experienced as an unpleasant emotional state, and further evidence pertaining to the effects of drinking alcohol, it was predicted that among social drinkers, dissonance arousal would increase the amount of drinking and that drinking, in turn, would reduce dissonance and subsequent attitude change. This hypothesis was tested in the first two experiments by having subjects taste rate different brands of an alcoholic beverage--ostensibly to test taste discrimination but in fact to measure the amount of drinking--immediately after dissonance was aroused by having them write a counterattitudinal essay. The effect of drinking on dissonance reduction was assessed by measuring subjects' postattitudes immediately after the drinking task. Both experiments found that although dissonance arousal had little effect on the amount of drinking, whatever drinking occurred was sufficient to eliminate dissonance-reducing attitude change. The second experiment further established that these results occurred for light as well as heavy social drinkers. Evidence that the dissonance-reducing effect of drinking resulted form some effect of drinking alcohol was provided by the finding, in the second and third experiments, that neither water or coffee drinking was sufficient to eliminate attitude change in this paradigm. Both the practical and theoretical implications are discussed. The practical implication is that some forms of alcohol abuse may evolve through the reinforcement of drinking as a means of reducing dissonance; the theoretical implication is that dissonance may be frequently reduced through behaviors that ameliorate the feelings of dissonance without involving cognitive change.

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In an experiment designed to apply Kelley's (1972) concept of causal schemata to drunken behavior, subjects read short stories depicting acts that did or did not have an a priori association with alcohol use. The actor was presented as either drunk or sober and as either an alcoholic or social drinker. Participants rated the actor's role as to perceived cause, responsibility, blame, and suggested punishment. Intoxication of the actor led to decreased attributions, with acts associated with alcohol not affected differently than nonassociated acts. The four dependent measures showed a pattern consistent with earlier findings that these variables reflect different judgments.