Anyone who has been drunk, been in the company of people who
are drunk, or even seen some good drunk acting in the movies, will know that your
ability to think clearly is not at its best.
There are some possible silver linings of thinking while drunk though, aren’t
there? It makes your mother-in-law
easier to deal with (I can only say that because I don’t have one :-)). It makes you more confident – perhaps with good and
bad consequences depending on the situation.
A new study out of Grenoble France by Aaron Duke finds another possible silver lining of thinking while drunk. If you are familiar with
the classic trolley problem, you know that people are
hesitant to take any active steps to harm someone, even if this action could save
several other people. But if you can
create enough psychological distance between the person and the harm, they can
do it. There are a lot of nuances to
this finding and no clear choice that is universally the most ethical. That’s what makes it such a rich research
area in ethics.
So Dr. Duke and his colleagues wanted to know what happens
with drunk people. Does the
psychological distance created by blurred thinking have this same effect? Turns out, it seems so. The more drunk that people (who they recruited in bars) were, the more willing they were to save the larger number of people at the expense of the one person, even if it
required the direct action of pushing the person onto the tracks. They were more
utilitarian. (The researchers say “rational,” but you know how much I dislike that term).
The researchers admit that there is an alternative
explanation. It could be that drunker
people don't take a hypothetical in a bar too seriously and so they have less of an emotional
aversion to thinking about actively harming the one person.
Their greater rationality isn’t real.
But it is an interesting case to imagine the possibilities. If drunk people make more utilitarian ethical decisions, perhaps we want jurors to be drunk when deliberating? What other applications can you think of?
