Don’t blame the beer goggles—they might be a myth

The existence of "beer goggles"—the tendency to find fellow drinkers growing more attractive as you drink more—is in dispute. A study conducted in a naturalistic setting (that is, a pub), found that increased alcohol consumption did not boost attractiveness ratings.

The existence of beer goggles has been studied in both lab and naturalistic settings before, but always with some limitations. In lab settings, well, people are in a lab. You can’t be sure that people’s behaviour when they’re being observed by people in white coats will match up with what they’d do in the real world.

That said, lab studies have the advantage of being able to control more factors. They can do a reasonable job of hiding the point of the experiment from the subjects, and they can control how much alcohol everyone drinks, measured out by body weight. A few of these studies have found a beer goggle effect for heterosexual participants rating opposite-sex faces, but they also rated same-sex faces and landscapes more highly, suggesting that they were just generally more pleased with the world after some scientifically sanctioned drinking.