The other day, someone did something I didn't expect. It was something many people have done before; something that I thought of as very normal, but that I in no way understood and had not predicted.
As I said, this had happened many time before, so I wrote it off as "me not understanding people" or "people are weird" for a second, like I usually do, before realizing that "bad at" really means "lacking basic knowledge", which I had never realized before.
And then I thought "I should ask someone who is different from me why people do that, and eventually someone will have an answer."
But many people will have many more questions like this. So, what have you observed people doing time and time again, but never understood? Or something that you only understood after a long time or asking someone about it?
And can Less Wrong tell us, not necessarily why (I for one can make up evolutionary psychology fairy tales all day if I want) but what conscious thought process occurs behind these events?
It's only a pre-commitment as far as the placebo effect causes you to engage in embarrassing behavior. There are some physical effects of alcohol, but your willingness to break social boundaries while intoxicated seems to depend only on how strongly you believe you are intoxicated.
source on one study: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3035442.stm source seeming to indicate that even the physical effects can be placebo-related: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1403295/
It may be not the whole effect, although a major part of it. My coworker says that the only time when he consumed noticeable amount of alcohol he was surprised by the thinking becoming more difficult. I can say nothing from personal experience because I cannot tolerate the taste long enough for any effects to manifest themselves.