Watch out, Project X! It doesn’t look like you have a very good influence on minors!
According to a new 6 European country survey, there is a link between alcohol use in movies and teen binge drinking.
How bad is the link? Robust and significant.
They polled more than 16,000 kids at public schools in Germany, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Scotland. And the countries have differing alcohol control policies, but that didn’t mean squat the the results.
This is how they did it:
‘For the study, exposure to on-screen booze use was calculated by summing up the number of alcohol occurrences in each movie the students had seen on a randomly-generated list of 50 local box office hits. The kids were then asked how often they├óΓé¼Γäód had 5 or more drinks of alcohol on one occasion ├óΓé¼ΓÇ£ which would classify as binge drinking.’
The study ended up finding that 40% of those with the most alcohol exposure had binged compared to 10-20% of those with some of the lowest exposure!
This lead them to making the statement that movie drinking is possibly the 3rd leading cause in onset of drinking.
Inneresting, but not shocking!
Kids are impressionable — and if a movie is showing ZERO negative consequences to drinking, then everybody is all for it.
[Image via WENN.]