I think the degree to which someone’s behavior changes while under the influence is mainly a function of how experienced they are with that level of intoxication. But the manner in which their behavior changes is a bit more mysterious.
If you’ve grown up with a group of people and seen them the first time they got drunk, as well as the 20th, you can watch them learn to compensate for being intoxicated. Those who take an interest in public health and safety are reluctant to acknowledge the idea that one can learn to “handle” being drunk, and certainly many habitual drinkers overestimate their ability to do so. But most people who have been intoxicated on multiple occasions do find ways to at least seem less drunk, sometimes without even being consciously aware of those strategies.
As to why some get louder while others get quieter, some get angry while others get affectionate, etc., I think it’s a combination of environment and personality. Some among us are working very hard to behave in a socially acceptable manner, but most of us are suppressing some urges here and there in the name of propriety. Alcohol lowers those filters, but I’m not sure it’s accurate to say it reveals our “true” selves. Imagine someone with a lot of anger, but who humbly recognizes how destructive his impulses are and routinely succeeds with great effort in behaving more kindly. Now picture someone who is just naturally friendly and charming, without having to try. Is the first guy a worse person because he has those dark impulse, or a better person because he struggles against them?
The old saw is that intoxication releases inhibitions.
So, a person’s behaviour while drunk is an indication of their inner personality that - most likely - they’ve learned growing up to bottle up.
the story about Indians of northern Canada is that - alcohol is similar to sugar. Northern natives have a low tolerance for both sugar and alcohol and metabolize it slowly. Hence, Type II diabetes is a serious problem among the older ones in modern society with its high-sugar diet. Also, if they get drunk, these natives stay drunk longer and could wake up still drunk rather than hung over, leading to longer alcohol abuse.
Or, that may be just racist BS. Socio-economic factors also tend to figure largely in alcoholism.
IIRC, the whole “evils of gin” crusades, including moral illustrations, etc. came from the emergence of distillation of spirits that became common in Europe about the 1600’s. Europeans went through a phase (have they stopped?) where alcoholism was a serious problem.
Hell, some people have learned to survive large amounts of alcohol. DesertWife was a med-tech. If you’re hauled in by the police for a blood alcohol level test, they’re the ones who draw the specimen and run the analysis. It’s a royal PITA because of the paper work involved preserving the chain of evidence. Whenever med-tech gather, their record BAC they’ve been involved with are always compared. Hers was 0.42% but she said one of her professors’ was 0.85%. I blinked at that and asked if that wasn’t past the LD50 point.
“Sure is, but the prof said not only was the guy not comatose, he wasn’t even slurring. You have to work up to it.”
I’m willing to bet that drinking reduced your ability to perceive how poor your singing voice was, and reduced your ability to perceive how uncoordinated your dancing skills were.
No analysis, merely an anecdotal report. Way back when, I EMT’d on a rural ambulance system that regularly delivered patients to the lonely regional medical center. One senior surgeon there was a known raging alcoholic. Staff told me he needed to be swacked in order to operate, lest DT’s throw off his aim. I’m glad I didn’t require his services on my own body.
I didn’t drink until I was 21 and had graduated college. Legal trouble due to underage drinking would have caused a problem for me, so I just stayed away from it.
I’m 32 now and I average a few drinks per week, mostly on the weekends. But I find alcohol doesn’t affect me much. It relaxes me, helps me enjoy social situations more, and helps me not stress over whatever worries are on my mind - but I’ve never done something drunk that I wouldn’t have done sober (other than, maybe, order one more drink).
The more I drink, I just get generally happier and happier and less worried about stuff until I start seeing double and feeling nauseous, and that’s no fun, so I stop. I suspect if I drank more at that point I’d just pass out.
This is consistent with my personality - I’m a pretty deliberate, reserved person and I’m rarely tempted to do something stupid in the first place. So even if alcohol removes my inhibitions a bit, that doesn’t change the end result much.
But it definitely has nothing to do with “learning to handle it” - this was my experience from my first drink at 21.
There is a theory that drunken behavior is mostly shaped by societal expectations and that because of this people from different cultures act very differently when drunk. There was a study called Drunken Comportment that showed the way people acted when drunk was very different between cultures and changed as cultural expectations changed. However it came from a time, 1969, when much social research was being faked.
