毫不怀疑，我们描述一个醉汉可以想出很多丰富的形容词。可当我们从他们的肢体语言去判别“他们是否真醉了“的时候，我们的能力可能还有待提高。美国心理学家Steve Rubenzer最近的研究得出这样的结果..-psytopic.com

我们每个人都有辨别别人是否醉了的标准。

可能是对方眼神漂浮，步伐紊乱。亦有可能是他留着口水对你说I LOVE U.

可是，大量对于普通人，警察，酒吧招待的研究发现，区别醉汉和清醒者（至少不是很醉的人）是极其困难的。

比如，看醉汉和清醒的人去会见谈判，酒吧招待需要把他们归类为：轻度，中度，中度饮酒。（喝很少，喝还好，喝很多）结果，酒吧招待的正确率不足25%。

Rubenzer同样注意到，我们民间所说的 比较灵敏的“酒醉指标”：

酒精会使眼睛变红：可是没有研究发现 什么时候开始红，以及红的数量与酒醉程度的关系。

喝多的人酒味重：可是酒精是无味的，这不能解释。或许可能与食物混在一团造成的。

语速变慢，含糊不清：但是仔细思考的人同样会这样。

脚步虚浮：只是在人喝非常高的时候才比较有效。

这个研究最后用了已经存在的“清醒测验”：

眼球震颤度（看移动物体眼球是否呆滞），昂白度（闭目难立）

指鼻测试，手指对手指，背字母表，等

得出结果，酒精摄入增加而这些测验的成绩不会下降。

但是这些状况常常被错误认为是一个人喝醉后的情况。

判别一个陌生人低度酒醉和中度酒醉实在是很困难。

目前没有行为的或是物理的证据 与 与人血液中的酒精含量相关，眼球震颤度除外。

PS.但是对照你个熟人的行为基线，应该就比较容易判断此人是不是开始高了吧。

原文：

How good are we at estimating other people’s drunkenness?

Sloshed, trollied, hammered, plastered. We’ve done a sterling job of inventing words for the inebriated state, but when it comes to judging from their behaviour how much a person has drunk, we could do (a lot) better. That’s according to a review of the literature by US psychologist Steve Rubenzer.

We all have our trusted indices for judging other people’s drunkenness. Perhaps it’s when the eyeballs start floating about as if under the control of a clumsy puppeteer. Or maybe the effusive ‘you know I love you’ delivered with a trickle of dribble. However, the vast majority of studies find that lay people, police officers and bartenders are in fact hopeless at distinguishing a drunk person from a sober one, at least at moderate levels of intoxication. To take just one example, after watching drunk and sober people being interviewed and negotiating a stair case, bartenders rated them as slightly, moderately or very drunk with an accuracy of just 25 per cent.

It’s a similar story when participants are equipped with more structured means of detecting drunkenness. One 1958 study, for example, found no relation between doctors’ assessments of people’s intoxication (based on pulse rate, general appearance, gait and mental status) and the subsequent performance of those people on a driving course.

Rubenzer also looked at the evidence for specific indicators of intoxication. Alcohol causes reddening of the eyes, the literature shows, but the association between intoxication level and onset or amount of redness is unreliable. Another indicator is smell. The more a person has drunk, the more likely that their breath will be judged by observers to smell of alcohol. However, this indicator is hampered by the lack of a scientific explanation (alcohol has no odour), not to mention the risk of contamination by food smells. Speech slowing and slurring is another sign of intoxication but people are only modestly accurate at using this as a measure. Predictably enough, impaired walking, the last of the specific indicators, tends to increase the more a person has drunk but it only becomes reliable at very high intoxication levels.

The review finishes by looking at established ’sobriety tests’: Nystagmus (jerky eye movements when following a moving target); the Romberg (whether a person sways or falls when they stand, eyes closed, with their feet together, arms at their sides); the Finger to Nose; the Finger to Finger; Saying the Alphabet; and the Hand Pat (alternating between clapping with the palms and backs of hands). In summary, performance on these tests does tend to decline as alcohol intake increases but the evidence for this at lower levels of intoxication is mixed and false positives (sober people categorised as drunk) are a frequent occurrence.

‘…[J]udging low to moderate levels of intoxication in strangers is a difficult task,’ Rubenzer concludes. ‘A variety of professions that might be expected to show substantial skill assessing intoxication do not. [And] no behavioural or physical sign has emerged that is consistently related to a specific level of blood alcohol concentration level without large variation among individuals, with the possible exception of nystagmus.’

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Rubenzer, S. (2010). Judging intoxication. Behavioral Sciences & the Law DOI: 10.1002/bsl.935