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I didn’t see it in the abstract but how are the alcohol and placebo administered? If they were ingested the participant surely knew they got alcohol or a placeb

I didn’t see it in the abstract but how are the alcohol and placebo administered? If they were ingested the participant surely knew they got alcohol or a placebo. And I assume that may have some impact on their performance aside from possibly being intoxicated. I suppose all 4 could be IV administered, but it doesn’t sound like that.

988747 4y ago
Well, you can give non-alcoholic beer to the subject telling them it is a real thing. Or make them a cocktail, such as Mojito, just a virgin one. Or the opposite: give them a soda secretly spiced with vodka. The possibilities are endless. But the problem is: people usually are familiar with how being drunk feels (and 0.1% BAC is pretty drunk), so it's almost impossible to hide the fact from them. So I guess "placebo group" is only with relation to drugs, not to alcohol.
- danachow 4y ago
  > But the problem is: people usually are familiar with how being drunk feels The problem is people know how alcohol tastes. Have you ever had a non-alcoholic beer?
  - bradknowles 4y ago
    There are alcoholic beers that taste as bad or worse as the non-alcoholic ones. And there are alcoholic drinks that taste like they have no alcohol in them at all. Or drinks where you cannot tell if they have any alcohol in them. There are ways to make these things blinded.
    - danachow 4y ago
      > Or drinks where you cannot tell if they have any alcohol in them. Proving this for a sample is pretty much impossible because you’re simply masking it and the sensory performance of humans is highly variable. You can get some imperfect approximation of blinding but it will be a compromise.
      - bradknowles 4y ago
        You can still control for this, by having the participants taste both drinks, in a blinded manner. If they can still somehow taste the difference between them, then you change your mix so that they can't tell the difference or eliminate them from the study. This may have other effects on the study, but at least you can be reasonably sure that no one can tell the difference between the substances being tested, except possibly by the effects they feel after consuming the substances in question.
        danachow 4y ago
        > If they can still somehow taste the difference between them, then you change your mix so that they can't tell the difference or eliminate them from the study. This has lots of problems, not least of which it is assuming you could afford to tweak your experimental protocol this way all in the recruitment phase. Do you have any examples in the literature where this is done? At least for the study in question they used the method of swabbing a negligible amount of alcohol on the rim of the glass to attempt to fool all participants into thinking they were getting alcohol.
        Trouble_007 4y ago
        Encapsulated 'freeze dried alcohol' aka 'powdered alcohol' <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='freeze dried alcohol' 'powdered alcohol' https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='freeze dried alcohol' '...>

988747 4y ago

Well, you can give non-alcoholic beer to the subject telling them it is a real thing. Or make them a cocktail, such as Mojito, just a virgin one. Or the opposite: give them a soda secretly spiced with vodka. The possibilities are endless. But the problem is: people usually are familiar with how being drunk feels (and 0.1% BAC is pretty drunk), so it's almost impossible to hide the fact from them. So I guess "placebo group" is only with relation to drugs, not to alcohol.

danachow 4y ago
> But the problem is: people usually are familiar with how being drunk feels The problem is people know how alcohol tastes. Have you ever had a non-alcoholic beer?
- bradknowles 4y ago
  There are alcoholic beers that taste as bad or worse as the non-alcoholic ones. And there are alcoholic drinks that taste like they have no alcohol in them at all. Or drinks where you cannot tell if they have any alcohol in them. There are ways to make these things blinded.
  - danachow 4y ago
    > Or drinks where you cannot tell if they have any alcohol in them. Proving this for a sample is pretty much impossible because you’re simply masking it and the sensory performance of humans is highly variable. You can get some imperfect approximation of blinding but it will be a compromise.
    - bradknowles 4y ago
      You can still control for this, by having the participants taste both drinks, in a blinded manner. If they can still somehow taste the difference between them, then you change your mix so that they can't tell the difference or eliminate them from the study. This may have other effects on the study, but at least you can be reasonably sure that no one can tell the difference between the substances being tested, except possibly by the effects they feel after consuming the substances in question.
      - danachow 4y ago
        > If they can still somehow taste the difference between them, then you change your mix so that they can't tell the difference or eliminate them from the study. This has lots of problems, not least of which it is assuming you could afford to tweak your experimental protocol this way all in the recruitment phase. Do you have any examples in the literature where this is done? At least for the study in question they used the method of swabbing a negligible amount of alcohol on the rim of the glass to attempt to fool all participants into thinking they were getting alcohol.
      - Trouble_007 4y ago
        Encapsulated 'freeze dried alcohol' aka 'powdered alcohol' <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='freeze dried alcohol' 'powdered alcohol' https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='freeze dried alcohol' '...>