Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

by Malcolm Gladwell

That’s inhibition-thinking: alcohol will unlock my good mood. But that’s plainly not what happens. Sometimes alcohol cheers us up. But at other times, when an anxious person drinks they just get more anxious. Myopia theory has an answer to that puzzle: it depends on what the anxious, drunk person is doing. If he’s at a football game surrounded by rabid fans, the excitement and drama going on around him will temporarily crowd out his pressing worldly concerns. The game is front and center. His worries are not. But if the same man is in a quiet corner of a bar, drinking alone, he will get more depressed. Now there’s nothing to distract him. Drinking puts you at the mercy of your environment. It crowds out everything except the most immediate experiences.2

The good parent is someone who is willing to temper their own immediate selfish needs (to be left alone, to be allowed to sleep) with longer-term goals (to raise a good child). When

The effects begin in the frontal lobes, the part of our brain behind our forehead that governs attention, motivation, planning, and learning. The first drink “dampens” activity in that region. It makes us a little dumber, less capable of handling competing complicated considerations. It hits the reward centers of the brain, the areas that govern euphoria, and gives them a little jolt. It finds its way into the amygdala. The amygdala’s job is to tell us how to react to the world around us. Are we being threatened? Should we be afraid? Alcohol turns the amygdala down a notch. The combination of those three effects is where myopia comes from. We don’t have the brainpower to handle more complex, long-term considerations. We’re distracted by the unexpected pleasure of the alcohol. Our neurological burglar alarm is turned off. We become altered versions of ourselves, beholden to the moment. Alcohol also finds its way to your cerebellum, at the very back of the brain, which is involved in balance and coordination. That’s why you start to stumble and stagger when intoxicated. These are the predictable effects of getting drunk.

In Mitchell’s experience, men and women react very differently to this scenario. The men tend to fold. The women don’t. “If you are a female pilot and they said they were going to do something to the other airman, the attitude of a lot of them was, ‘It sucks to be you,’” he said. “‘You do your job, I’m going to do mine. I’m going to protect the secrets. I’m sorry this has happened to you, but you knew this when you signed up.’” Mitchell first saw this when he debriefed women who had been held as POWs during Desert Storm. They would drag those women out and threaten to beat them every time the men wouldn’t talk. And [the women] were angry at the men for not holding out, and they said, “Maybe I would have gotten a beating, maybe I would have got sexually molested, but it would have happened one time. By showing them that the way to get the keys to the kingdom was to drag me out, it happened every time. So let me do my job. You do your job.”