An online study of an international sample of adolescent and adult alcohol users found that in social non-alcohol drinking environments, younger participants who experienced more social conformity reported higher overall alcohol use. The opposite is true for older adults: the more socially conformed they become, the less alcohol they consume. In social non-drinking environments, social conformity was associated with more alcohol use among older participants, but less among younger participants. The paper is addictive behavior.
Social conformity is the degree to which an individual adjusts his or her behavior to be in harmony with the social environment without explicit social pressure. It is the tendency to notice and interpret the reactions, expectations, and social norms of others, and to adjust one’s behavior accordingly. Social conformity helps people adjust to others and gain acceptance within a group. It can be explicit, when people consciously change their behavior in response to their peers, or implicit, when adjustments occur automatically.
Several studies have linked social harmony to alcohol use and related problems. In drinking situations, we may adjust how much we drink depending on how much our friends drink or seem to approve of their drinking. People with high social adjustment may drink more if their peers encourage drinking or treat heavy drinking as normal. The same tendency can lead to drinking less if a friend opposes drinking or supports temperance.
Adolescents and young adults may be particularly sensitive to such influences because social acceptance and peer affiliation are particularly important during development. Perceived drinking norms are also important because people may drink more if they mistakenly believe that most of the people around them are drinking heavily.
Christoph Romaine, a researcher at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and his colleagues assessed whether high social conformity towards peer alcohol use from late adolescence to early adulthood is associated with increased alcohol consumption and related problems. They also investigated the role of gender in relation to age and social conformity. In this particular study, social conformity was measured as the change in drinking intention in different social settings after being presented with information about a hypothetical colleague’s drinking intention in the same scenario.
Study participants were 811 people recruited across two studies. The first wave was conducted in 2022 and included 534 participants, while the second wave included 277 participants recruited in 2023 and 2024. Because the authors focused on alcohol drinkers, they excluded candidates who did not drink alcohol, candidates who failed to complete the main task, and non-binary participants. This is because the small number of non-binary participants precluded accurate statistical estimation for that group.
After these exclusions, the final sample consisted of 683 individuals. Participants were recruited through social media, Dutch university participant pools, and direct leaflet distribution. Participants in the second wave were also recruited through an online survey platform. The job advertisements targeted cannabis and alcohol users over the age of 15.
Study participants completed an implicit social conformity task. In this task, participants viewed 45 images depicting an equal number of social alcohol drinking situations, social nonalcoholic drinking situations with drinks such as soda, and social nondrinking situations where no drink was present. After each image, participants were asked to rate their willingness to consume alcohol in the depicted situation.
Immediately after responding, participants were shown hypothetical peer feedback about how willing their peer group would be to drink in that situation. There were 6 situations in which the feedback matched the participant’s willingness to drink, and 39 situations in which peer feedback indicated a high or low desire to drink. After completing a short memory task, participants viewed the same images and indicated their willingness to drink alcohol again.
The authors derived two social conformity scores based on how much one’s drinking intentions changed after seeing peer feedback. One score indicated the extent to which a participant’s willingness to drink changed in situations where peer feedback indicated an increase in willingness to drink. The other score indicated how much peer feedback changed in situations where they indicated a decrease in willingness to drink.
The scientists calculated both scores for each of the three situations. Participants also answered one question regarding alcohol use disorder symptoms, ratings of standard units of alcohol, marijuana, and cigarettes consumed in the past 2 weeks, and binge drinking.
Results showed that there was no interaction between social harmony and age in predicting overall alcohol use when examining specific positive or negative peer feedback. However, when combining the overall responses for each social environment, there were some interactions between age and social conformity. In social nonalcoholic drinking situations, younger participants with greater overall social harmony reported more alcohol use. In similar situations, older adults who experienced more social harmony reported drinking less alcohol.
In contrast, in social non-drinking situations, younger participants who showed more social agreeableness reported less alcohol use. Older participants who were more socially attuned in these environments tended to report more alcohol consumption. The researchers noted that the results regarding gender were not statistically significant, suggesting that social conformity functions similarly across genders in these situations.
“Depending on age and social environment, SA (social conformity) can be either a risk or protective factor for alcohol use,” the authors concluded.
This study contributes to the scientific understanding of factors associated with alcohol use. Note that this study included participants’ self-reports and did not measure actual observations of real-world drinking behavior. Cross-sectional designs also prevent scientists from determining whether these behaviors actually change within individuals over time.
The paper “Social harmony and alcohol use: The role of age and gender” was written by Christophe Romein, Karis Colyer-Patel, Emese Kroon, Helle Larsen, hanan El Marroun, and Janna Cousijn.
