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‘Binge’ drinking in the UK: a social network phenomenon

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Ormerod, Paul Wiltshire, Greg
Copyright Year	2009
Abstract	In this paper, we analyse the recent rapid growth of ‘binge’ drinking in the UK. This means the rapid consumption of large amounts of alcohol, especially by young people, leading to serious anti-social and criminal behaviour in urban centres. British soccer fans have often exhibited this kind of behaviour abroad, but it has become widespread amongst young people within Britain itself. Vomiting, collapsing in the street, shouting and chanting loudly, intimidating passers-by and fighting are now regular night-time features of many British towns and cities. A particularly disturbing aspect is the huge rise in drunken and anti-social behaviour amongst young females. Increasingly, policy makers in the West are concerned about how not just to regulate but to alter social behaviour. Smoking and obesity are obvious examples, and in the UK ‘binge’ drinking has become a focus of acute policy concern. We show how a simple agent based model approach, combined with a limited amount of easily acquired information, can provide useful insights for policy makers in the context of behavioural regulation. We show that the hypothesis that the rise in binge drinking is a fashion-related phenomenon, with imitative behaviour spreading across social networks, is sufficient to account for the empirically observed patterns of binge drinking behaviour. The results show that a small world network, rather than a scale-free or random one, offers the best description of the data.
Starting Page	135
Ending Page	152
Page Count	18
File Format	PDF
ISSN	15937879
Journal	Mind & Society
Volume Number	8
Issue Number	2
e-ISSN	18601839
Language	English
Publisher	Springer-Verlag
Publisher Date	2009-05-17
Publisher Place	Berlin, Heidelberg
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Agent based model Social network effect Simulation methodology Cognitive Psychology Philosophy of Science Sociology Methodology of the Social Sciences Economics general
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Philosophy Sociology and Political Science Experimental and Cognitive Psychology History Economics, Econometrics and Finance Social Psychology Cultural Studies

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