Not sure we saw this one coming.

A new study suggests that drinking a moderate amount of beer may make people less willing to help someone who is in pain, even if it doesn’t necessarily make them less capable of understanding what that person is feeling.

The study, published in August in Human Psychopharmacology: Clinical and Experimental, examined how drinking beer affects different aspects of empathy.

Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Romania recruited 66 adults and gave them either a 6.6% ABV beer or its non-alcoholic equivalent.

And this wasn’t simply a matter of asking participants how empathetic they felt after drinking.

Before and after consuming the beer, participants watched videos of people describing emotional experiences and attempted to identify how those people were feeling. Researchers also presented them with scenarios involving people experiencing physical or emotional pain and asked how willing they would be to help.

The results were interesting.

Researchers found no convincing evidence that drinking beer impaired what psychologists call “empathic accuracy,” basically the ability to correctly understand another person’s emotions.

But when it came to actually helping someone, things changed.

Participants with lower scores on a test used to identify potentially hazardous drinking showed reduced “behavioral empathy” after consuming alcohol. In other words, they were less willing to help people presented to them in painful situations.

Interestingly, that effect wasn’t found among participants with higher hazardous-drinking scores.

The researchers aren’t suggesting that having a couple beers suddenly turns someone into an uncaring jerk. And the study, which involved only 66 participants, comes with some important limitations.

The authors acknowledged that the findings may not necessarily translate from Dutch beer drinkers to people in other cultures. The experiment also measured participants’ responses to hypothetical scenarios rather than their actions during actual social interactions.

And even the researchers characterized the overall evidence linking moderate beer consumption and empathy as mixed.

Previous studies have found that alcohol can impair certain aspects of empathy and social cognition, while others have found little or no effect. This study also failed to replicate an earlier finding that alcohol reduced people’s ability to accurately identify positive emotions in others.

What it does suggest is something considerably more specific.

Drinking a moderate amount of beer may not stop you from recognizing that somebody else is having a bad day.

But apparently it might make you a little less inclined to do something about it.

###

And while we’re at it there’s this…

Is Craft Beer Healthier For You Than Wine?

Is An IPA A Better Beer For Your Health?

Beer Buzzkills: Hidden Health Dangers In Non-Alcoholic Beer