Steele C M, Southwick L
J Pers Soc Psychol. 1985 Jan;48(1):18-34. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.48.1.18.
Drinking alcohol clearly has important effect on social behaviors, such as increasing aggression, self-disclosure, sexual adventuresomeness, and so on. Research has shown that these effects can stem from beliefs we hold about alcohol effects. Less is known about how alcohol itself affects these behaviors. A cognitive explanation, that alcohol impairs the information processing needed to inhibit response impulses--the abilities to foresee negative consequences of the response, to recall inhibiting standards, and so on--has begun to emerge. We hypothesize that alcohol impairment will make a social response more extreme or excessive when the response is pressured by both inhibiting and instigating cues--in our terms, when it is under inhibitory response conflict. In that case, alcohol's damage to inhibitory processing allows instigating pressures more sway over the response, increasing its extremeness. In the present meta-analysis, each published test of alcohol's effect on a social, or socially significant behavior was rated (validated against independent judges) as to whether it was under high or low inhibitory conflict. Over low-conflict tests, intoxicated subjects behaved only a tenth of a standard deviation more extremely than their sober controls, whereas over high-conflict tests they were a full standard deviation more extreme. The effect of conflict increased with alcohol dosage, was shown not to be mediated by drinking expectancies, and generalized with few exceptions across the 34 studies and 12 social behaviors included in this analysis.
饮酒显然会对社会行为产生重要影响，比如增加攻击性、自我表露、性冒险行为等等。研究表明，这些影响可能源于我们对酒精作用的认知。关于酒精本身如何影响这些行为，我们了解得较少。一种认知解释开始浮现，即酒精会损害抑制反应冲动所需的信息处理能力——预见反应负面后果、回忆抑制标准等能力。我们假设，当反应受到抑制性和刺激性线索的双重压力时——用我们的话说，当处于抑制性反应冲突时，酒精造成的损害会使社会反应更加极端或过度。在这种情况下，酒精对抑制性处理的损害会让刺激性压力对反应产生更大影响，从而增加反应的极端程度。在本次荟萃分析中，每一项已发表的关于酒精对社会行为或具有社会意义行为影响的测试（由独立评判员进行验证），都根据其处于高抑制性冲突还是低抑制性冲突进行了评级。在低冲突测试中，醉酒受试者的行为比清醒对照组仅极端十分之一个标准差，而在高冲突测试中，他们则极端整整一个标准差。冲突的影响随着酒精剂量的增加而增强，研究表明它不是由饮酒预期介导的，并且在本次分析纳入的34项研究和12种社会行为中，几乎无一例外地具有普遍性。
