Alcohol may make women more honest – and less keen to dominate other people
Professor Douglas Durand monitored the unconscious motivations of 37 women before and after they imbibed alcohol at a regular meeting of their garden club. Garden clubs are a traditional American social institution – small, frequent get-togethers to exchange gossip and the occasional gardening tip. The professor gathered data as to the women's fantasies about power.
This happened in the mid 70s, when Durand was a faculty member at the University of Missouri-St Louis's school of business administration. He is now dean emeritus.
Durand distilled his findings into a report called "Effects of Drinking on the Power and Affiliation Needs of Middle-Aged Females", published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology.
Previous research by others had suggested a gross generalisation: that when men down a drink or two they often dream of making nice things happen for other people. But after a few more the altruism melts away. They yearn instead to dominate their fellow man.
Durand went about his research in roughly – but not exactly – the same way as those earlier investigators.
The women's garden club met, as was customary, at a member's home. At the start of this particular meeting, each woman took a fairly standard written test called the thematic apperception test, which was supposed to measure her fantasies about power. Then came the booze. Durand explains: "The subjects wore identification tags and were free to consume the number of drinks that they preferred." A bartender served up standard-measure drinks, each containing one ounce of 86-proof liquor, and kept a tally of how many drinks each woman downed during the next hour and a half. At the meeting's end, everyone took another written test.
Durand analysed his fantasies-before-and-after-drinking data and concluded that "in comparison with their male counterparts, the middle-aged women in this study displayed quite a different motivational pattern after consumption of alcohol." As the study explains it, the garden club's top guzzlers showed distinctive patterns. After three or more drinks, Durand writes, "alcohol may allow a woman to drop any social pretext" about "caring for others" and let her express less concern about maintaining "warm relationships". And these heavy drinkers, unlike glug-glugging men, become less – not more – impelled to dominate their fellows.
But the experiment did involve just 37 individuals on one occasion — a small sample on which to base any large conclusions. And it left a glaring mismatch with the studies of men, none of whom were evaluated in a garden club setting.
Both deficiencies can be rectified, and on a multinational scale. The Men's Garden Clubs of America has as a stated objective "To render service to all members and the gardening public". And the newly formed Garden Club London proclaims: "an international branch of the Garden Club (founded in New York) … Its aim is simple: to survive the recession with drink in hand".
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize