I found myself recommending it to a business student recently. He was saying he's having conflicts with his technical cofounder, so I told him to just stop working and go grab drinks, talk about anything except work. Put your keyboards down and go be normal for a few hours.
The sad thing is that I think you're right--alcohol consumption is normal. I'm glad I'm not normal. Let us know if he took your suggestion and if it actually resolved anything.
It's not actually the alcohol thats important. It's the glasses that matter, the liquid inside could be anything.
Having something to do with your hands prevents/reduces nervousness, and the fact that you can't drink and talk at the same time enforces conversational turn-taking. All these things apply to cigarettes too, which goes some way to explaining their tenacious grip on some social groups despite their lack of tangible benefits, (ie. they dont get you high)
These are the most important things, but also there's the halfhourly rhythm of having to get new drinks, which gives everyone a chance to switch conversations, and the practice of buying strangers drinks in rounds, which builds and reinforces trust.
So yeah, don't sweat about the intoxicants if thats not your thing. Just go and order your juice of choice.
Hooray for juice! Though I'm still skeptical that the drinks actually matter; if you enclose people in a limited-senses environment (like a bar where the t.v. is muted and doesn't have anything interesting on anyway) for long enough they're going to start talking to each other and entertaining themselves that way. Do you know of any studies into this? It's fun to speculate about at least.
> All these things apply to cigarettes too, which goes some way to explaining their tenacious grip on some social groups despite their lack of tangible benefits, (ie. they dont get you high)
I thought that was better explained primarily by the addictiveness of cigarettes and then by the social outcasting of smokers forcing them to band together.
There are tonnes of studies into the effects of physical and social context on alcohol intoxication. As you might expect, a lot of it is all in the mind (or in the bar.)
On the smoking thing, yeah definitely the reasons you mentioned are by far the most important. However I still think it's too often overlooked that a lot of people are effectively using them as "comfort blankets."
The above link appears to do some horrible cookie checking whereby you can only read the abstract two or three times before it punts you to a shopping cart page without even an apology. Bloody academic mafia.
