Moderate Drinking = Sexy, New Study Says
Hey now! People find moderate drinkers the most attractive. (Photo: Stocksy)
New research has discovered that how much you drink can have a big influence on how attractive you are to others — and moderation is key.
A new study from the University of Houston found that people rate social drinkers as having the most attractive drinking habit, above teetotalers and heavy drinkers.
The study, which was published in the journal Addictive Behaviors, had nearly 600 heterosexual college students look at 25 pictures of faces of people of the opposite sex. Each face had a label that described them as a heavy drinker, social drinker, non-drinker, or recovering alcoholic that doesn’t drink. (Researchers constantly mixed up the labels so that the same face was associated with different drinking habits.)
Related: 12 Ways Drinking Is Secretly Sabotaging Your Life
Study participants were asked to rate each picture on a zero to seven scale on attractiveness, intelligence, likeability, and approachability. Here’s how each group was rated on overall appeal:
Social drinkers, 3.69
Recovering alcoholics, 3.42
Non-drinkers, 3.27
Heavy drinkers, 2.86
“We expected social drinkers to be rated as most attractive, intelligent, likeable, and approachable based on past qualitative work which found that social drinkers tended to be described positively,” lead study author Chelsie Young, a graduate student at the University of Houston, tells Yahoo Health.
Related: Why More Women Are Binge Drinking
Researchers theorize that social drinkers were rated the most attractive due to a phenomenon called “homophily,” in which we’re more drawn to people who we think are similar to us. Since most college students drink socially, they’re more likely to rate other social drinkers are more attractive. (Young points out that study participants who were heavy drinkers were also more likely to rate other heavy drinkers as attractive, backing up the theory.)
But why were recovering alcoholics rated so much higher than non-drinkers? Young says she was surprised by that finding, but says people might have rated recovering alcoholics favorably because the label researchers used (“this college student is a recovering alcoholic and therefore abstains from using alcohol”) showed that the alcoholics recognized they had a problem and were working to change it.
Related: It’s Official: A Lot of Us Have a Drinking Problem
“There is something admirable about displaying self-control and working towards improving one’s self,” Young explains. “Abstainers may show self-control also, but could potentially be viewed as ‘stuck up’ or 'boring’ and heavy drinkers may be perceived as lacking self-control.”
While the findings are interesting, Young says they have real-world implications for how people might initially become interested in getting to know someone else.
Essentially, if you want to increase your odds of meeting more people at a party, maybe take a pass on doing shots and stick to one or two cocktails for the evening.
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