Eavesdropping on undergrads isn’t a hobby, really, just a by-product of working at Penn.

As a point of fact, half the stories I overhear on campus start or end with some variation of: “I was so drunk.” This is often offered as an excuse or explanation for behavior that is ridiculous, rowdy, embarrassing, or — I’ll grant you this — occasionally hilarious.

But it turns out you can’t blame your especially enthusiastic Soulja Boy routine on Coors Light alone.

In a series of studies in the 1970s and 1980s, students were given — over the course of about an hour — either five icy tonic waters or five vodka tonics, without knowing which was which. The results?

The studies found that people who thought they were drinking alcohol behaved exactly as aggressively, or as affectionately, or as merrily as they expected to when drunk.

It’s true: it happened to me.

When I was about eleven years old, I was at a friend’s big annual Christmas party. Her family was Swedish, and while the adults were guzzling Absolut, the kids were supplied with an unfamiliar Swedish-labelled soda. In the middle of the meal, my friend casually mentioned to the table that this mysterious Swedish soda was in fact alcoholic.

Suddenly, everything changed.

The kids, about 15 in all, started giggling uncontrollably. A few got up to use the bathroom, stumbling and tripping along the way. Glasses were knocked over, soda was hoarded, and all the kids — normally a pretty polite bunch — burped loudly and without embarrassment.

I’m sure you know how this story ends: we had been punk’d. The soda, of course, was completely non-alcoholic, and we all looked like a bunch of pint-sized fools — fools, who, by the way, had only the faintest idea of what being drunk even looked like.

Tags: drinking, punk'd, Soulja Boy, Swedish

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 11:57 am and is filed under Higher Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.