"It gives me confidence"

Here's another example. A friend is turning forty in the function room above a pub. There'll be sixty people and you know four of them. You arrive, find somewhere for your coat, and stand for a moment with that feeling of having too many arms. You go to the bar. Twenty minutes and one drink later you're talking to somebody's cousin about campervans and enjoying it.

The credit goes to the drink. It always has. You might even call it Dutch courage, a phrase that files the courage under the drink before you've thought about it.

Three experiments bear on this.

In the first, published in 2001, Abrams and colleagues recruited 61 people with social phobia, which means social anxiety severe enough to be diagnosed. Each gave a speech to a group, then had a drink, then gave a second speech. A third were given alcohol and told so. A third were given a drink with no alcohol and told it was alcoholic. A third had a soft drink and knew it. Anxiety fell more from the first speech to the second in the alcohol group than in the soft drink group. It also fell more in the placebo group, who'd had no alcohol at all. The alcohol group probably did a bit better than the placebo group, though that difference wasn't quite reliable. The authors concluded that the drug and the belief add together.

So belief alone produced a measurable drop in anxiety, in people whose anxiety was clinical. They had the confidence in them already. They needed to think it had been supplied.

The second experiment is about what that confidence is worth. In 2013 Laurent Bègue and colleagues gave 94 people either an alcoholic or a non-alcoholic drink, and told half of each group the truth and half the opposite. Everyone then gave a short speech and rated how attractive, bright, original and funny they'd been. People who believed they'd had alcohol rated themselves higher, whatever had been in the glass. Then 22 independent judges watched the recordings. The boost in self-rating had no relation to how people had performed.

I'd put it this way. Believing you'd had a drink made you feel funnier. It didn't make you funnier. What you've been calling confidence looks to me like a drop in self-monitoring, a quieter version of the voice that asks how you're coming across.

The third experiment cuts against my argument, and it belongs here for that reason. In 2012 Michael Sayette's team put 720 young social drinkers into groups of three strangers, and gave each group a moderate dose of alcohol, a placebo, or a soft drink they knew was soft. Over 36 minutes the alcohol groups showed more genuine smiling, more of the easy turn-taking of good conversation, and fewer negative expressions. The placebo groups looked like the soft drink groups. Here the drug did something that belief didn't.

One detail complicates even that result. Afterwards people rated how bonded they felt to their group. The drinkers averaged 7.22 on the scale and the people who knew they were on cranberry juice averaged 7.07, a difference too small to be statistically reliable. By their own account, strangers drinking juice got on about as well as strangers drinking vodka. The lowest score, 6.74, came from the people who thought they were drinking vodka and weren't. My guess is that they were waiting for a lift that never arrived.

A later review by Catharine Fairbairn and Sayette proposed that alcohol's social effect comes largely from freeing people from preoccupation with rejection. That's a fair description of the first twenty minutes at the fortieth. The too-many-arms feeling is preoccupation with how you look to a room that isn't looking.

And those twenty minutes pass for everybody. The start of any party is the worst of it, for the drinkers and the drivers alike. You find a familiar face, the room fills and gets louder, someone introduces the cousin. Time and the drink arrive together, and the drink gets the credit.

You might say you really are shy, and that may be so. But consider how you've practised. If every party since you were seventeen has started at the bar, then you've never once practised walking into a room without a drink, and every success you've had has been filed under the glass. The skill is yours. You've been signing someone else's name on it.

There's an easy observation to make at the next do. Find the people who aren't drinking, the driver, the pregnant friend, the one on antibiotics. Watch them at ten o'clock and ask yourself whether they're visibly worse company than the rest of the room.