At the risk of delving into an issue that is fraught philosophical peril, a new study suggests that a single alcoholic drink can alter your moral code making you potentially more open to immoral behavior.

Once again, the American Craft Beer editorial crew asks the tough questions…And one question we’re asking is “what were these researchers thinking?”

“For centuries the impact of alcohol on decision making and lowering inhibitions has been known, creating popular phrases such as ‘Dutch courage’, but its impact on morality has remained something of a mystery,” the Drinks Business reports.

But now a new study by researchers at the University of Silesia in Poland, a study that harkens back to the abstinence movement that lead to prohibition in the 1920s, suggests that intoxicated participants, after just one drink, “sacralized moral foundations of care and purity”…their words not ours.

Published in the journal Psychopharmacology, the report aimed to understand if alcohol affected “the willingness to violate moral foundations”, such as care, fairness, authority, loyalty and purity.

Yikes, this is sketchy territory for science to delve into, but here we go…

Speaking to PsyPost, one of the study’s authors, Mariola Paruzel-Czachura, said there was little research to understand how drunk people think and right and wrong, and what their intentions are.

The study used the Moral Foundations Sacredness Scale which is “explicitly focused” on  moral foundations to gauge its results.

Study participants had one drink within a 10-minute window and then watched two emotionally-neutral movie clips. Blood alcohol levels were then measured to confirm intoxication and participants questioned by the various groups.

And according to the study participants were found to have a greater willingness to consider engaging in impure behavior, such as attending an event where partakers act like animals, “crawling around naked and urinating on stage.”

We don’t even know how to react to that quote.

The research team did find that “even one strong alcoholic drink changes the willingness to do harmful and impure behaviors, like kicking the dog in the head.”

Talk about yielding to the “dark side.”

On the other hand, the study did find that alcohol did not change “the willingness to stand against authorities or be disloyal or unfair”.

So there’s that…

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