Aidan Curran posted on July 25, 2008 19:00
Research from France has found that the louder the music in a bar, the more you will drink.
The claim is made by Nicolas Gueguen, professor of behavioural science at the University of Bretagne-Sud in Brittany, in a paper entitled “Sound Level of Environmental Music and Drinking Behaviour: A Field Experiment with Beer Drinkers” which has been published in the journal “Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research”.
Researchers visited two bars for three Saturday evenings in an unidentified city in the west of France. The subjects, 40 males aged between 18 and 25 years of age, were unaware that they were being observed.
For the purposes of consistency, the standard drink was a 25 cl. glass of draught beer (i.e. a half pint, the normal unit of beer consumption in France). Another criterium was the music being played: only current chart hits.
At random, and with the permission of the bar owners, the research team changed the sound levels between either 72 decibels, considered normal, or 88 decibels, considered loud. Each time, the researchers would observe one subject’s drinking patterns. After the observed subject left the bar, sound levels were again randomly selected and a new subject was chosen.
The results showed a link between loud music and the tendency of bar patrons to drink more and faster. At the normal decibel level, customers had an average of 2.6 drinks and took 14.5 minutes to finish each drink. However, when the music was loud, customers ordered an average of 3.4 drinks and took less than 11.5 minutes to finish each one.
Guéguen has two possible explanations for his team’s findings. "One, in agreement with previous research on music, food and drink, high sound levels may have caused higher arousal, which led the subjects to drink faster and to order more drinks," he says.
"Two, loud music may have had a negative effect on social interaction in the bar, so that patrons drank more because they talked less."
In other words, loud music gets you excited but stops you having a conversation, so you channel your energy into drinking. The results are consistent with findings of psychological manipulation in advertising and supermarket environments.
However, Professor Gueguen makes a more serious point. Over 70,000 a year die in France because of chronic alcohol consumption, and drinking is linked the majority of fatal car accidents. "We have shown that environmental music played in a bar is associated with an increase in drinking," he said. "We need to encourage bar owners to play music at more of a moderate level, and make consumers aware that loud music can influence their alcohol consumption."
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