In which I reveal ...

... what a base human being I am.

There is a fascinating new paper about the use of alcohol and drugs as a way to signal things about ourselves to others:

It is argued that drug consumption, most commonly alcohol drinking, can be a technology to give up some control over one’s actions and words. It can be employed by trustworthy players to reveal their type.

Okay, here is the no doubt unethical experiment I'd like to try. I'd like to hide video-cameras in a campus bar and have the staff replace all alcoholic beverages for each sex with fakes (placebo drinks as it were). I'd like to give all the men placebo drinks one night and all the women placebo drinks on a subsequent night. Then I'd like to compare the behaviour patterns of the two sexes after multiple drinks.

And yes, I'm guessing that differences will be considerably less marked than we might guess. That, in addition to what the study above suggests, we don't use the alcohol only to give up control; sometimes we use alcohol in order to have an excuse to give up control.

Update: mea culpa, belated H/T Tyler Cowen