Alcohol Myopia: Its Prized and Dangerous Effects
Steele & Josephs (1990) · American Psychologist, 45(8)
Relied on in 1 place across the academy · 1 stated limit
What it found
Reviewing the drinking experiments, the authors argue that alcohol's social effects come from impaired attention — a myopia in which the most immediate cue governs behaviour. The same narrowing is why it relieves anxiety when there is something to distract you, and why it makes people misread a room.
What it does not show
A theoretical review of laboratory drinking studies. It explains why alcohol both calms and misleads; it does not test what one drink does to one nervous person on one evening.
And where we carry it further
A theoretical review of laboratory studies, not a study of dates. Whether a single drink helps or hurts a nervous person on one evening is not something this paper can settle.
Where we rely on it
1 place in the academy. If this paper turned out to be wrong, this is the list that would have to change. Some of the instructions below are part of Gold; none of the findings are.
In the curriculum · 1
Cited alongside it
Papers that sit under the same topics and films. Not a claim that they agree with each other — only that the same exercises lean on both.
The Liking Gap in Conversations: Do People Like Us More Than We Think?
Boothby, Cooney, Sandstrom & Clark (2018)Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as Excitement
Brooks (2014)Beautiful Mess Effect: Self–Other Differences in Evaluation of Showing Vulnerability
Bruk, Scholl & Bless (2018)It Doesn't Hurt to Ask: Question-Asking Increases Liking
Huang, Yeomans, Brooks, Minson & Gino (2017)Duration Neglect in Retrospective Evaluations of Affective Episodes; When More Pain Is Preferred to Less
Fredrickson & Kahneman (1993); Kahneman, Fredrickson, Schreiber & Redelmeier (1993)Post-Event Processing in Social Anxiety
Rachman, Grüter-Andrew & Shafran (2000)Research
A real study. We tell you what it found, how many people were in it, and what it can't prove.
Free to read, link to and quote. If we have carried this paper further than it goes, say so at contact@suaviq.com — corrections to this registry are the most useful mail we get.