This article suggests that binge drinking is likely to cause people to empathize less. Empathy is regarded as an aptitude that defines us as human beings. If binge drinking affects one’s ability to be empathetic, does it mean it can render us less human, or humane?
I imagine it’s difficult to feel empathy for other people when you’re busy killing feeling sorry for yourself.
I’d also question the direction of cause and effect. Does binge drinking cause reduced empathy, or does reduced empathy (AKA feeling especially sorry for yourself vs. for others) cause binge drinking?
Note also there’s really two very different sorts of binge drinking.
The “wild college party everybody’s having fun laughing and carrying on” binge drinking and the “I’m gonna get good and drunk to drown my sorrows” binge drinking. Two utterly different mental states on the part of the drinker, probably with very different causes and very different effects.
cf:
I got a boozy friend who has never had empathy. A real asshole, actually. Don’t know why we put up with other.
Maybe the most extreme binge drinker ever Jim Morrison had absolutely zero empathy. But then Teetotaler Adolf Hitler didnt have any either.
“In this study, binge drinking was defined as drinking more than 60 grams of pure alcohol during a single sitting at least once in the past 30 days. That’s about three-quarters of one bottle of wine, or 2.5 pints of lager.”
That’s a pretty liberal definition of binge drinking. The CDC defines it more narrowly:
“Binge drinking is defined as a pattern of drinking that brings a person’s blood alcohol concentration (BAC) to 0.08 g/dl or above. This typically happens when men consume 5 or more drinks or women consume 4 or more drinks in about 2 hours.”
https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/binge-drinking.htm#:~:text=Binge%20drinking%20is%20defined%20as,a%20severe%20alcohol%20use%20disorder.
Or 2 margaritas.
I find it slightly incredible that having a few drinks one weekend/month could make it that much harder to feel empathy. It also seems like a very small study (71 people) and so I question whether it is repeatable.
Of course it’s repeatable. That’s the entire bloody point. To Science!
If that’s the criteria, then I haven’t binged in ages. I may have 3-4 drinks in a day (weekend or vacation), but I stretch it over way more than two hours. If I had 5 in two hours I probably wouldn’t feel much of anything.
Three quarters of a bottle of wine is 562ml, and in the UK, at least, where the study was conducted, pub/bar glasses of wine are 175ml. It’s also very common to have 250ml glasses. So it’s not actually five glasses of wine, it’s just over three, or just over two large glasses. It also doesn’t say two hours in that article, only in the CDC guidelines, though of course presumably the actual study was more rigorous than asking people how much they drank in a single “sitting.”
Still, it really would not be difficult to find someone who’d had three glasses of wine over two hours in the last month. 2 and a half pints of beer in two hours would be drinking slowly, if anything. It’s a bit of an odd amount to choose. Over the Christmas period in the UK practically the only people who wouldn’t do that at least once would be teetotallers and pregnant women (OK, I’m exaggerating slightly, but not by much), which would mean that the ones who didn’t qualify as “binge” drinkers would be the outliers. In certain summer periods an awful lot of people would drink a whole 2 and a half pints in a single “sitting.”
It still is interesting that the people who’d drunk that much apparently showed effects up to 30 days later, but something about it doesn’t feel right.
Well. I think a lot of it depends on your mindset and why you are getting drunk. If you are consistently looking to get drunk in a short period of time, there is usually some negative thoughts there. Even if it’s in a “wild college party” context. From what I recall from my college days, there was a very short trip from “everybody’s having fun laughing and carrying on” to “is that sonofabitch laughing at me and carrying on with my ex-girlfriend??!! I’m gonna kick his ass!”
Interesting definitions of “binge drinking”. As a layman, I always thought of it as: excessive drinking + speed of consumption with the intent to get extremely drunk, and done repeatedly. It seems my definition is not universally shared.
I think of it as the amount + speed even though my definition is slightly more alcohol than the study used. It still has connotations of intent and repetition, but I’m fine with throwing them out in service of scientific rigor since the other criteria are more objective. I guess repetition could be objective, but it’s more of a bell curve thing to me because if you consume more than a bottle of wine at a go several times a year I wouldn’t consider you a “binge drinker” full stop, but if you consume more than a bottle of wine at a go several times a week you’re also not a binge drinker, but in the opposite sense.
It makes sense. Even in the post-drinking and hangover stage, there is probably some residual impact on the brains of binge drinkers. When drunk, binge drinkers are less able to recognize when they are being socially inappropriate, and they are less likely to consider the consequences of their interactions and behaviors, so it isn’t hard to believe that they struggle to recognize when someone needs emotional support.
Wait…
So what you’re saying is, if I want to give less of a crap about other’s feelings, I need to start binge drinking…
…actually, nevermind, it seems I already have.
I don’t binge drink and I have never had any difficulty doing it. (Kind of - my own conscience is fiercest critic.)
Let me rephrase it a little:
I don’t binge drink and I have never had any difficulty ignoring what other people may think about me. My own conscience is my fiercest critic.
I do care about other people’s feelings.