A moderate dose of beer reduces your willingness to help others in pain

A moderate dose of beer might not impair your ability to read someone’s emotions, but it could make you less willing to help them if they are in pain, a new study suggests. Research published in Human Psychopharmacology: Clinical and Experimental indicates that social drinkers who consume a moderate amount of alcoholic beer show a reduced willingness to assist people in distressing situations. However, the study did not find evidence that drinking beer altered people’s ability to accurately perceive the feelings of others.

Empathy is a complex social skill that involves both recognizing how someone else feels and responding to that feeling. Scientists often divide this into different components, such as empathic accuracy and behavioral empathy. Empathic accuracy refers to the ability to correctly interpret another person’s emotional state, like realizing a friend is secretly sad even when they are smiling. Behavioral empathy describes the willingness to take action to help someone experiencing physical or emotional pain.

Alcohol is frequently consumed in social settings, prompting scientists to explore how it might alter these empathic abilities. Prior research has yielded mixed results, leading researchers to wonder if the type of beverage matters. For example, a 2018 study found that a moderate dose of vodka impaired the ability of men to accurately read positive emotions in others.

Lead author Isabelle Cristina Baltariu, a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist based in Romania, designed the new study with colleagues at the University of Groningen to build on this research progression. They wanted to test whether the same impairment holds true when people drink beer, which is widely consumed in everyday social situations, and whether alcohol dampens the actual willingness to help people in pain.

“This study was part of my doctoral research investigating the link between alcohol dependence, aggression, and empathy,” Baltariu told PsyPost. “Beyond the clinical curiosity shared with my advisors, this research addresses a critical societal issue in Romania, where alcohol-related violence and femicide remain widespread.”

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“I wanted to look deeper into human psychological traits—specifically empathy—to help explain the mechanisms behind this aggression and find potential avenues for clinical intervention,” she said.

To investigate this, the researchers recruited 66 individuals, 62% of whom were men, with an average age of 25. Participants first completed baseline questionnaires, including a measure of their typical drinking habits to identify any hazardous patterns. The researchers then randomly assigned participants to drink either a moderate dose of alcoholic beer or an equivalent amount of non-alcoholic placebo beer.

The alcoholic beverage contained 6.6% alcohol, and each participant received a dose scaled to their body weight. On average, the blood alcohol concentration in the alcohol group peaked at 0.56 milligrams per liter about ten minutes after finishing the drink. Participants completed two tasks measuring empathy both before and after drinking.

Empathic accuracy was measured by having participants watch short video clips of people recounting positive or negative autobiographical events. Participants continuously rated how the person in the video was feeling, and these ratings were compared to how the individuals in the videos had actually rated their own feelings. To measure behavioral empathy, participants read hypothetical scenarios involving people in high levels of physical or emotional pain, or low-pain situations.

After reading the scenarios, participants used a slider scale from 0 to 100 to indicate how willing they would be to help the person in distress. When analyzing the results, the researchers did not replicate the findings of the 2018 study. They found no reliable evidence that drinking beer worsened participants’ ability to accurately read either positive or negative emotions in the video clips.

The ability to recognize emotions remained largely intact regardless of whether participants drank alcoholic or non-alcoholic beer. “The most remarkable aspect was observing the sheer degree of variability in how alcohol influences empathy across different measures—both within our study and across past literature,” Baltariu noted.

“Running a precise pharmacological experiment like this is a rare opportunity, and actually capturing these controlled behavioral and emotional shifts in real time reinforced just how complex human social cognition really is,” she added.

However, the alcoholic beer did alter participants’ willingness to help others, and this effect depended on their typical drinking habits. Among individuals who reported low, non-hazardous drinking habits on the initial questionnaire, behavioral empathy scores decreased after consuming alcohol.

This means they became less willing to help people in painful scenarios after a few drinks. Interestingly, this reduction in helpfulness did not appear among participants who regularly engaged in heavier, more hazardous drinking. The alcohol also did not reliably affect general helping behavior in low-pain scenarios for any group.

“I want to be careful to avoid oversimplification: alcohol does not instantly erase empathy,” Baltariu explained. “How significant that impairment is depends on the individual, their drinking habits, and the social context. It is about a loss of accuracy and sensitivity, not a total shutdown of human caring.”

The finding that alcohol reduces the willingness to help people in distress is generally consistent with research covered by PsyPost in 2020. That earlier study indicated that sober young binge drinkers show impaired neural processing when viewing others in pain, requiring compensatory brain effort. The new study adds to this by showing an immediate drop in behavioral willingness to help after acute alcohol consumption.

On the other hand, the lack of an effect on emotion recognition stands in tension with a 2025 study covered by PsyPost. That research found that an intoxicating dose of alcohol impaired people’s ability to recognize angry expressions while increasing self-reported emotional connection with peers. It is worth noting that these studies measured distinct facets of empathy across different alcohol types and drinking populations, which might explain the differing results.

The 2025 study used live group interactions and measured anger recognition, while the new study used video-based empathic accuracy and hypothetical willingness to help.

“The main message is that alcohol can create a deceptive gap between how connected we feel and how accurately we actually read others,” Baltariu said. “In everyday life, knowing that alcohol quietly degrades our emotional radar helps explain why mild misunderstandings can easily turn into real friction over a couple of drinks.”

“It is important to view these findings as a foundational baseline,” she continued. “A moderate dose shows us that alcohol can measurably alter our capacity to empathize with others, even if the effect size appears modest under controlled laboratory conditions.”

“In real-life scenarios—or with higher alcohol intake—those subtle shifts in emotional accuracy can be the difference between de-escalating a disagreement and escalating it,” Baltariu pointed out.

There are a few other things to keep in mind when interpreting these new results. First, the researchers had a smaller number of female participants than they originally planned.

This was partly because they excluded women using hormonal contraceptives, as previous research suggests these medications can independently alter emotion recognition. Because of this smaller sample, it is difficult to say for sure whether men and women experience these alcohol-induced changes in empathy differently. Additionally, the study used a moderate dose of beer, which might act differently on the body and brain than a moderate dose of hard liquor.

Beer is carbonated, which can change how quickly alcohol is absorbed into the bloodstream. The researchers noted that different types of alcohol, consumed at varying doses, might produce different effects on social skills.

Future research could explore how alcohol alters empathy during live, unstructured social interactions rather than relying on computer-based video tasks and written scenarios.

“My immediate next step is concluding a clinical study that explores the alcohol-aggression link in individuals diagnosed with Alcohol Use Disorder,” Baltariu said. “Using a case-control design, we assessed both cognitive and affective empathy alongside proactive and reactive aggression.”

“Long-term, my goal is to pinpoint how specific empathy impairments drive different types of aggression, providing the necessary insights for clinical practice to develop targeted psychological interventions and treatments for alcohol-related violence,” she concluded.

The study, “Empathic Accuracy and Behavioral Empathy After a Moderate Dose of Beer,” was authored by Isabelle Cristina Baltariu, Violeta Enea, Teresa B. Prucker, and Marije aan het Rot.