With the exams and seminar paper behind my back, for now, I'm back writing blog posts. A few months ago, while researching personality in psychology, I found a paper on a self-study about alcohol's effect on personality. Given this, I got curious about its influence on my personality.
Disclaimer Regarding Alcohol Consumption
Before I share my research, I want to mention that I - in no way - recommend or encourage alcohol consumption. Excessive drinking is dangerous, if not even fatal. As such, I want to discourage any attempts of copying the described approach here. If, despite all, you still plan to try it yourself, talk to a doctor beforehand to help you stay safe.
Personality Models in Psychology
Most people probably heard about the Myers-Briggs personality types. However, the best is a personality model backed by a lot of research, which is the case for the five-factor model (FFM). FFM categorizes personality into five dimensions. You can remember these by the mnemonic OCEAN, where the letters stand for openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, respectively. It is widely used and appended with systems like the NEO-PI-R, adding six facets to each dimension.
Meaning of OCEAN[1,2]
I won't explain the whole FFM in this blog post. However, I do think explaining the domains and facets helps, understanding the results.
Openness: Often short-form for "Openness to Experience" is linked with intellect, intelligence, and creativity. It describes how curious and open people are to new experiences and also how liberal they are.
It is then split into the facets of:
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imagination artistic interests emotionality adventurousness intellect and liberalism
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people higher in imagination use fantasy to spice up the ordinary life how much interest and appreciation a person has in art how much people are aware of and able to access their own feelings determines how much people avoid routines and explore or try out new things the interest people have in abstract ideas and thinking hard determining how likely people are to challenge convention and tradition |
Conscientiousness: This one is linked with the need for cleanliness, structure, and order. People who end up on the higher end feel the need to be useful and successful and they are careful and plan ahead.
Its facets are:
Self-Efficacy Orderliness Dutifulness Achievement-Striving Self-Discipline Cautiousness | how confident people are in their ability of achievement describes people's organization and cleanliness determines a person's sense of duty and obligation defines how hard a person strives for accomplishments how self-disciplines a person is how careful people are on their decisions |
Extroversion: Most people are familiar with the idea of someone extroverted. That's the basis of this domain.
This domain has the facets:
Friendliness Gregariousness Assertiveness Activity Level Excitement-Seeking Cheerfulness | is associated with how open people are towards others describes how much people enjoy the company of others and of how many assertive people take the initiative and lead determines how much people enjoy a busy instead of a relaxed life correlates to the interest in risks and thrills is associated with how strong people feel positive emotions |
Agreeableness: Agreeable people are nicer towards other people even strangers.
It has the facets: Trust Morality Altruism Cooperation Modesty Sympathy | determines how much a person believes others are fair or good correlates with sincere and unguarded people behave towards others is how much people enjoy helping others is associated with the will of compromising or forfeiting on your needs for others describes how modest people are gives how much people can feel the pain of others |
Neuroticism: Neuroticism is linked to the reaction to negative emotions. People high in neuroticism are more likely to be pessimistic or faster to be affected by stress and negative emotions.
The facets are: Anxiety Anger Depression Self-Consciousness Immoderation Vulnerability | defines how often and fast people become anxious or stressed is how fast or easy people get angry is the tendency to feel depressed determines how much people care about what others think is the ability to resist lust and cravings describes the ability to withstand stress |
The Approach
With FFM explained, let's see how I approached the self-experiment. There's a website by a Professor of the Pennsylvania State University which provides a personality test using FFM Neo PI-R given the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP).[2] To determine the alcohol's effect we'll take the delta before and after consumption. For this, I did the IPIP sober, using the full 300-item inventory for higher accuracy. For the second round, I prepared both cocktails and water. The purpose of the water is to combat hypohydration (water deficit) from the alcohol. Instead of measuring the exact alcoholemia (alcohol level in blood), I stopped drinking once physical and mental symptoms appeared. These include a slowdown of eyes, balance issues, increased talkativeness, and heightened mood. After repeating the IPIP, I compared the results.
The Results
Due to privacy, I'll publish the delta instead of the exact results.
| Openness +1 |
Conscientiousness +0 |
Extraversion +21 |
Agreeableness +10 | Neuroticism -8 |
| Imagination +12 |
Self-Efficacy -6 |
Friendliness +24 |
Trust +18 |
Anxiety -11 |
| Artistic Interests +5 | Orderliness +0 |
Gregariousness +22 |
Morality +21 |
Anger +0 |
| Emotionality +16 |
Dutifulness -6 |
Assertiveness +8 |
Altruism +0 |
Depression -16 |
| Adventurousness +0 | Achievement-Striving +13 | Activity Level +0 |
Cooperation -5 |
Self-Consciousness -24 |
| Intellect -22 |
Self-Discipline +13 |
Excitement-Seeking +13 | Modesty +3 |
Immoderation +12 |
| Liberalism -7 |
Cautiousness -29 |
Cheerfulness +16 |
Sympathy +5 |
Vulnerability +5 |
When evaluating the results, it is important to keep in mind, results from personality tests deviate to a certain degree. Thus, we should only consider significant changes. Let's consider any deltas smaller or equal to five as insignificant.
We often link behaviors such as increased extraversion, decreased cautiousness and decreased worry to alcohol consumption. The changes across the whole extraversion domain reflect this increase. The big drop in cautiousness matches too. Lastly, the decrease of worry appears in the decrement of certain facets in neuroticism as well. Interestingly imagination increased, and intellect decreased. Especially since we shouldn't confuse the latter with intelligence. Another interesting discovery is the increase of immoderation by quite a bit, making it harder to resist drinking more, which results in a vicious cycle.
Conclusion
I rarely get drunk, but it sometimes happens during parties or celebrations. I felt like I'm more lost in thought, occasionally bursting out. I also enjoy philosophy even more than without, which is weird. So, I was interested in the result. Now given it, it seems typical and according to expectation. Non-the-less it is still interesting.
[1] 2017 Personality 14: Introduction to Traits/Psychometrics/The Big 5 - Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCceO_D4AlY
[2] International Personality Item Pool Representation of the NEO PI-R http://www.personal.psu.edu/~j5j/IPIP/
