Beer Goggles: I’m Not as Think as You Drunk I Am
--
Anyone who has been in a crowded bar around closing time knows that the higher your alcohol intake, the more attractive you will find whoever you happen to be flirting with at last call. Their smile is radiant, their eyes are sparkling, and everything about them is sexy, alluring, and irresistible.
However
if you were stone-cold sober, you might not give them a second glance.
C’mon. You know it’s true.
So if you get really carried away and spend the night with your new friend, you may wake up the next morning wondering just what the hell you were thinking — and seeing.
You have fallen prey to the Beer Goggles phenomenon, and most who partake of the Devil' nectar have been there at some point.
If it’s any consolation to those severely traumatized by this trick-of-the-eye, there really is actual science behind your incredibly embarrassing anecdote.
Researchers have found that human attraction is based on bilateral symmetry. This means that if a human body were split down the vertical center, each side would identically mirror the other. It would also be a murder scene, but I digress.
This preference for bilateral symmetry has been bred into us by thousands of years of evolution and hundreds of years of Cosmo magazine.
A study performed at London’s Roehampton University suggests that an impaired ability to judge symmetry when you’re loaded might explain why that 3 is presenting as a 10 after you enthusiastically tipple.
What this boiled down to was that the sober test participants were more drawn to people with symmetrical faces and were better at picking them out of a crowd, which supported their hypothesis.
An unexpected discovery was that males proved better than females at determining whether faces were asymmetrical or not. Perhaps this is because in general men are more sexually stimulated visually than women are.
