Self-consciousness, self-esteem, and success-failure as determinants of alcohol consumption in male social drinkers.

An experiment was conducted to test the proposition that alcohol is consumed as a function of the quality of past performances and the individual's level of private self-consciousness. One hundred and twenty male subjects were randomly given success or failure feedback on an intellectual task. They then participated in a separate "wine-tasting" experiment in which they were allowed to regulate alcohol consumption. As predicted, high self-conscious subjects who had received failure feedback drank significantly more wine than did high self-conscious subjects who received success feedback. Consumption by low self-conscious subjects fell between these extremes and did not vary as a function of success and failure. Additional data indicated that these results were mediated by differential sensitivity to the positive or negative implications of success/failure by high and low self-conscious subjects. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for theoretical accounts of the psychological antecedents of alcohol consumption.