YVETTA FEDOROVA

One tribe is reserved, another wild, when consuming alcohol.

By BENEDICT CAREY

Researchers have had a hard time understanding binge behavior.
Until recently, their definition of binge drinking - five drinks or more in 24 hours - was so loose that it invited debate and ridicule from some scholars.
The dynamics of bingeing may have more to do with personal and cultural expectations than with the number of margaritas consumed.
In their classic 1969 book, “Drunken Comportment, recently out in paperback, the social scientists Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton wrote that the disconnect between the conventional wisdom on drunken behavior and the available evidence “is even now so scandalous as to exceed the limits of reasonable toleration.
They detailed the vast differences in the way people from diverse cultures behave after excessive alcohol.
In contrast to nearby tribes, for example, the Yuruna Indians in the Xingu region of Brazil would become exceptionally reserved when rendered sideways by large helpings of alcohol.
The Camba of eastern Bolivia would drink excessively twice a month.
They would toast one another more lavishly with each drink.
In a Japanese island village, Takashima, people knew a drinking occasion had gone wild if villagers began to sing or dance.
Western cultures are more likely to excuse binge drinking as a needed mental break.
In a series of studies in the 1970s and ‘80s, psychologists at the University of Washington observed more than 300 students .
The researchers served alcoholic drinks to some of the students and nonalcoholic ones to others.
The students typically drank five in an hour or two.
The studies found that people who thought they were drinking alcohol behaved exactly as aggressively, or as affectionately, or as merrily as they expected to when drunk.
“No significant difference between those who got alcohol and those who didn’t, Alan Marlatt, the senior author, said.
“Their behavior was totally determined by their expectations of how they would behave.
Somewhere between personal preferences and social custom, moreover, the peer group asserts itself.
In a recent study, public health researchers in New Zealand conducted interviews with teenage girls in one of two cliques at a high school.
Both groups associated drinking with uninhibited behavior - and that is what they exhibited.
But one group considered being uninhibited to include kissing, and the other considered it to include more.
Dr. MacAndrew and Dr. Edgerton acknowledged that Western societies, and certainly the United States, send multiple signals on bingeing.
Other times, cultural expectations and personal preferences reinforce each other.
The hope that a wild session might “reveal new things about myself or “allow me to act completely out of character is echoed in pop culture and drinking lore.
If the research is a guide, those hopes should be self-fulfilling .
Unless, that is, the binge goes beyond any reasonable definition of excess.
Then the amount of alcohol consumed matters - and poison is poison in any culture.