Alcohol affects goal commitment by explicitly and implicitly induced myopia.

Abstract

Alcohol commits people to personally important goals even if expectations of reaching the goals are low. To illuminate this effect, we used alcohol myopia theory, stating that alcohol intoxicated people disproportionally attend to the most salient aspects of a situation and ignore peripheral aspects. When low expectations of reaching an important goal were activated students who consumed alcohol were less committed than students who consumed a placebo. We observed less commitment regardless of whether low expectations were explicitly activated in a questionnaire (Study 1) or implicitly activated through subliminal priming (Study 2). The results imply that, intoxicated people commit to goals according to what aspects of a goal are activated either explicitly or implicitly.