Attempts to Influence the Value of Alcohol by Manipulating Social Influence and Context.

Background: Recent cognitive neuroscience models of value-based decision-making suggest value-based choices for alcohol are sensitive to various inputs, such as context and social influence. In two online experiments, we tested whether manipulating these inputs influenced proxies for alcohol value. Experiment 1: 157 social drinkers were presented with 4 hypothetical scenarios (drinking alone, with friends who are also drinking, with friends but trying to "cut-down" for health reasons, with friends who aren't drinking) in a within-subjects design, and completed the Brief Assessment of Alcohol Demand after each as a measure of value. Value for alcohol (number of drinks purchased) was greatest when drinking with friends who were also drinking compared to drinking alone (d = 0.95), friends not drinking (d = 1.49) and friends drinking/health related (d = 1.59). Value for alcohol was also greater when drinking alone compared to with friends who were not drinking (d = 0.55), and also with friends drinking/health related (d = 0.62). Experiment 2: 241 participants were randomly allocated to see one of four categories of images in a 2 (context: bar vs house) x 2 (social influence: enjoy vs not enjoy) design, before completing a Concurrent Choice Task for alcohol and Visual Analog Scales. There were no significant effects found on either task, both taken as proxies for value. Conclusion: There was inconclusive evidence that the value for alcohol could be manipulated by social context. This could be explained by greater saliency of the manipulation in asking participants to imagine themselves in a hypothetical situation as opposed to presenting images depicting drinking scenarios.

Careless responding in crowdsourced alcohol research: A systematic review and meta-analysis of practices and prevalence.

Crowdsourcing-the process of using the internet to outsource research participation to "workers"-has considerable benefits, enabling research to be conducted quickly, efficiently, and responsively, diversifying participant recruitment, and allowing access to hard-to-reach samples. One of the biggest threats to this method of online data collection however is the prevalence of careless responders who can significantly affect data quality. The aims of this preregistered systematic review and meta-analysis were: (a) to examine the prevalence of screening for careless responding in crowdsourced alcohol-related studies; (b) to examine the pooled prevalence of careless responding; and (c) to identify any potential moderators of careless responding across studies. Our review identified 96 eligible studies (∼126,130 participants), of which 51 utilized at least one measure of careless responding, 53.2%, 95% CI [42.7%-63.3%]; ∼75,334 participants. Of these, 48 reported the number of participants identified by careless responding method(s) and the pooled prevalence rate was ∼11.7%, 95% CI [7.6%-16.5%]. Studies using the MTurk platform identified more careless responders compared to other platforms, and the number of careless response items was positively associated with prevalence rates. The most common measure of careless responding was an attention check question, followed by implausible response times. We suggest that researchers plan for such attrition when crowdsourcing participants and provide practical recommendations for handling and reporting careless responding in alcohol research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).