Behavioral Scientists May Have Found Way to Reduce Drinking in Young Adults

Young people may be more tempted to give up the booze if they know their friends are doing that too, new research suggests.

Due to the sway that social norms may have on young people, they may drink more alcohol due to the assumption that everyone else does as well.

Upon discovering that this assumption is false, and that there is a discrepancy between the levels of perceived and actual drinking, they may subsequently drink less, according to a new paper in the journal Alcohol: Clinical & Experimental Research.

This approach may provide a way to reduce drinking in young adults, and marks the first study that tested how young adults in a local community react to their peers' drinking habits: previously, studies have only focused on college students.

"There are decades of literature showing that young adults are highly impressionable to social norms (i.e., their perceptions of how approving their peers are of alcohol use, and how much their peers drink), but an equally consistent finding is that young adults tend to dramatically overestimate these peer norms—perceiving that peers are more approving of, and engage in, more alcohol use than is actually the case," Scott Graupensperger, an assistant professor of health and risk behaviors at the University of Washington, told Newsweek.

"Showing young adults personalized feedback about how much they drink in relation to others and correcting overestimated norms around peers' drinking has the power to make young adults reconsider how much they should be drinking.

"For those who may want to reduce their drinking or not drink in the first place, there may be concerns about being ostracized or left out; showing feedback that peers do not actually drink as much as one perceived signals that they would likely not face disapproval or rejection from their peers," he said.

"These misperceptions can be corrected in brief interventions such as personalized normative feedback (PNF), which shows actual norms for young adult drinking. PNF is a very consistent strategy for reducing alcohol use and related harms, but there is still room for improvement in the effect sizes."

In the study, the authors describe how they investigated the drinking habits of 546 adults aged between 18 and 24 from around the U.S. The participants filled out a survey about their alcohol use, and how they perceived their social group's drinking habits.

They were then split into two groups, and underwent a dynamic norms intervention, which presented them with the dynamic norms of alcohol use for their age group, including drinking frequency, amount of drink consumed, binge drinking, and drunk driving. The term refers to behavior that is predicted to become standard in the future, as opposed to social norms, which refers to current behavior.

The participants were asked to guess their peers' alcohol use, and were then shown how it compared to 2021 data, as well as trend-level information for 2016–21. The researchers found that in a follow-up survey one month after this dynamic norms intervention, there was a 26 percent reduction in how many drinks they assumed others drank, as well as a 39 percent drop in how many drinks they themselves drank. There was also a 63 percent decline in drunk driving.

There were no apparent changes in episodes of binge drinking, however, and there was no effect on baseline drinking levels.

"Our study is beginning to test and implement a recent social psychology finding that people are actually more influenced by trends in norms—i.e., dynamic norms—than they are by the current norms alone," Graupensperger said.

"Based on this work, we have hypothesized that correcting normative misperceptions in the context of a historical trend showing declining drinking rates among young adults, could help increase the effect sizes of brief PNF interventions."

The study indicates that providing feedback about how peers are drinking can help young people reduce their own drinking.

"We believe this proof-of-concept study builds on the existing literature by integrating historical trends information showing young adults are generally drinking less and less each year. In this sense, seeing that drinking rates are declining may signal to young adults that the 'times are changing' and could encourage them to conform to this favorable trend in norms," Graupensperger said.

But due to the fact that the participants self-reported their drinking in both surveys, it is unclear if they were telling the whole truth about their drinking habits.

"Self-report measures of substance use are highly valid and have been corroborated by numerous objective measures of consumption," Graupensperger said.

"There has been no evidence to suggest young adults will be untruthful in survey data, so long as the data are confidential (as in our study). The only minor limitation could be inaccurate recall of exactly how much one drank over a period of time, e.g., past month.

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Update 12/18/2023 11:39 ET: This article was updated to include comment from Graupensperger.