Drinking psychology

I am all for having fun, and there is no denying what goes on in the majority of fraternity parties, but it has come to my attention that an unnamed Cornell frat will be sponsoring a rather…questionable event (at best). The upcoming event / activity / drinking game, whatever you want to call it, is basically an “alcohol raffle.” The premise is simple.

1) The participant takes shots of liquor to earn raffle tickets
2) The winning ticket holders receive various bottles of liquor.

Obviously, the chance of winning is directly related to the number of raffle tickets one owns. When discussing the raffle among my peers, most concluded that either, one: it is awesome, or two: there is something unsafe about it. But nobody seemed to be quite as taken aback by it as I thought was warranted, and the conversation merely brushed the surface of the ‘unsafe’ subject. However, if one looks into the underlying psychology involved in the event, I think that the results are quite disturbing.

The first step is to familiarize ourselves with the average, frat-party going, beer-chugging persona that would likely enter into such a raffle. Typically, in my experience with teenage drinking, it seems that these people go into the night with the intent to drink until they are drunk; their motivation to drink is to reach drunkenness. As the person becomes increasingly intoxicated, the motivation to drink more is therefore decreased until it is, for all practical purposes, gone. When this point is reached, the rate of consumption is either dramatically decreased or stops immediately (i.e, people become distracted, become busy, fear of being sick later..).

So, if we assume the above to be true statements, then we can say the ‘alcohol raffle’ is potentially dangerous because it completely alters the mentality behind drinking for the participant, in a few ways:

A) The motivation for drinking is completely changed; the person is drinking to obtain tickets rather than to become drunk. Because there are so many raffle tickets, essentially an infinite number for all practical purposes, then the motivation does not yield an attainable goal.

B) Without a reachable goal, once the person is drunk, they (in their minds) have no reason to stop. They have yet to reach their (unreachable) goal, and they have now lost track of their drunkenness for the sake of the game. Unless there is strong self-control exhibited here, there is nothing stopping the participant to increase their chances of winning… that’s right – more alcohol.

When the psychology of drinking is changed from (ideally) harmless fun to competitive sport, the danger and level of unsafeness increases greatly.