Department of Psychology, The University of Memphis, 202 Psychology Building, Memphis, TN, 38152, USA.
Department of Behavioral Science, University of Kentucky College of Medicine, 1100 Veterans Drive, Medical Behavioral Science Building Room 140, Lexington, KY, 40536, USA; Center on Drug and Alcohol Research, University of Kentucky College of Medicine, 845 Angliana Ave, Lexington, KY, 40508, USA; Department of Psychology, University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences, 110 Kastle Hall Lexington, KY, 40506, USA; Department of Psychiatry, University of Kentucky College of Medicine, 3470 Blazer Parkway, Lexington, KY, 40509, USA.
Drug Alcohol Depend. 2021 Mar 1;220:108523. doi: 10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2021.108523. Epub 2021 Jan 11.
Behavioral economic theory predicts decisions to drink are cost benefit analyses, and heavy episodic drinking occurs when benefits outweigh costs. Social interaction is a known benefit associated with alcohol use. Although heavy drinking is typically considered more likely during more social drinking events, people who drink heavily in isolation tend to report greater severity of use. This study explicitly disaggregates between-person and within-person effects of sociality on heavy episodic drinking and examines behavioral economic moderators.
We used day-level survey data over an 18-week period in a community adult sample recruited through crowdsourcing (mTurk; N = 223). Behavioral economic indices were examined to determine if macro person-level variables (alcohol demand, delay discounting, proportionate alcohol-related reinforcement [R-ratio]) interact with event-level social context to predict heavy drinking episodes.
Mixed effect models indicated significant between-person and within-person social context associations. Specifically, people with a higher proportion of total drinking occasions in social contexts had decreased odds of heavy drinking, whereas being in a social context for a specific drinking occasion was associated with increased odds of heavy drinking. Person-level R-Ratio, demand elasticity, and breakpoint variables interacted with social context to predict heavy episodic drinking, such that the event-level social context association was stronger when R-Ratios, alcohol price insensitivity, and demand breakpoints were high.
These results demonstrate an ecological fallacy, in which the size and direction of effects were divergent at different levels of analysis, and highlight the potential for merging behavioral economic variables with proximal contextual effects to predict heavy drinking.
行为经济学理论预测，饮酒决策是成本效益分析，当收益超过成本时，就会发生重度间断性饮酒。社交互动是与饮酒相关的已知益处。尽管在更多的社交饮酒事件中通常更有可能发生重度饮酒，但在孤立环境中重度饮酒的人往往报告使用的严重程度更高。本研究明确区分了社交对重度间断性饮酒的个体间和个体内影响，并检验了行为经济学的调节因素。
我们使用了通过众包（mTurk）招募的社区成年样本在 18 周内的每日水平调查数据（N=223）。检查了行为经济学指数，以确定宏观个体水平变量（酒精需求、延迟折扣、比例酒精相关强化[R-比]）是否与事件水平的社会环境相互作用，以预测重度饮酒发作。
混合效应模型表明存在显著的个体间和个体内社会背景关联。具体而言，在社交环境中总饮酒次数比例较高的人，重度饮酒的几率较低，而在特定饮酒场合处于社交环境中，则与重度饮酒的几率增加相关。个体水平的 R-比、需求弹性和断点变量与社会环境相互作用，预测重度间断性饮酒，即当 R-比、酒精价格不敏感性和需求断点较高时，事件水平的社会环境关联更强。
这些结果表明存在生态谬误，即不同分析水平的效应大小和方向存在差异，并强调了将行为经济学变量与近端情境效应相结合以预测重度饮酒的潜力。
