Implicit Social Attunement Alcohol Use: The Effect of Peer Feedback on Willingness to Drink in Social Settings

Aims. Social alcohol use is highly common and associated with heavier alcohol consumption, but most studies have focused on explicit measures of perceived social drinking norms. This study aimed to 1) develop an implicit social attunement (ISA) task to experimentally assess how willingness to drink alcohol is affected by social alcohol drinking (SAD), social non-alcohol drinking (SNAD), and social non-drinking (SND) settings and peer feedback on willingness to drink in these settings, and 2) assess how ISA is associated with explicit social attunement, age, alcohol use and alcohol use related problems. Design. Cross-sectional. Setting and participants. An online assessment completed by an international sample (N = 506, 60.1% female) of 16–60-year-olds recruited from the Netherlands. Measurements. The ISA task and questionnaires assessing alcohol use and alcohol use related problems, age, and explicit social attunement. Findings. Willingness to drink was highest in the SAD setting (p<.001). Lower peer willingness to drink induced higher ISA than higher peer willingness to drink (highest p = .036). Higher ISA to higher peer willingness in the SAD (r = .15, p < .001) and SNAD (r = .12, p = .007) settings was associated with higher alcohol use and related problems, while higher ISA to lower peer willingness in the SND (r = -.18, p = .002) setting was associated with lower alcohol use and related problems. Explicit social attunement, but not ISA, mediated the association between lower age and higher alcohol use and related problems (b = –.013, p = .009). Conclusions. Results indicate that peer feedback might act as protective or risk factor for alcohol use depending on the social setting and highlight the potential differences between implicit and explicit social attunement behaviors in their associations with age and alcohol use and related problems.