Why You Drink More Than You Mean To When You're With Your Friends

Attention, early-20s set! New research shows how your social circle can affect your alcohol habits. (Photo: Getty Images)

Hitting the town this weekend? The bigger your posse, the more you’ll end up drinking, a new study suggests.

Results of a small study, published in the journal Addiction, show an association between the number of people present in the group while out on the weekend and the number of alcoholic beverages consumed in an hour.

The study included 183 young adults in Switzerland with an average age of 23, about half of whom were women. Researchers had them complete cell phone questionnaires on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings over the course of five weekends. The questionnaires asked how much alcohol they consumed and the number of friends present at different hours of the evening (8 p.m, 9 p.m., 10 p.m., 11 p.m., and midnight).

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Number of friends present in the group seemed to decrease throughout the course of the night on Thursdays, stay stable throughout the course of the night on Fridays, and increase from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Saturdays. The average number of friends ranged from 1.9 to 6.4 for the men, and 1.8 to 5.7 for the women.

Overall, researchers found that the more friends present in the group, the more alcohol a person consumed (this effect was stronger for men than for women). Researchers also found that drinking pace accelerated as the evening went on, especially on Fridays and Saturdays. (The researchers posited this is due to the “school night” effect of Thursdays.)

“It appears that other factors, such as decreasing self-control as levels of inebriation increase or being increasingly involved in nightlife activities, such as dancing or playing drinking games, may be responsible for the acceleration in drinking pace,” the researchers write.

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Even though the study was conducted only in French-speaking young adults in Switzerland, the researchers said the findings may still be generalizable to people of similar age elsewhere in the world (though they said more research is needed to confirm this). And since the study only looked at drinking at 8 p.m. and onward, more research is also needed to see how drinking earlier in the evening — also known as “pre-drinking” — could affect results.

Alcohol consumption is incredibly common among young adults, with some data suggesting more than three-quarters of people ages 21 to 24 are “current drinkers.” However, many young people drink more than health experts recommend — more than half of young men and more than two-fifths of young women drink more than the daily recommended limit (one drink a day for women and up to two drinks a day for men).

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