When influencers raise a glass, young viewers want to join them

(Press-News.org) An attractive influencer couple chats in a kitchen as they prepare dinner. A wine bottle sits on the counter. Someone takes a sip. It looks less like an ad than a slice of ordinary life, the kind of moment that can pass unnoticed during an aimless scroll on social media.

But a randomized experiment from Rutgers Health and Harvard University suggests those casual cues matter. Young adults who viewed influencer posts with alcohol were significantly more likely to desire a drink than peers who watched similar posts – from the same influencers – with no alcohol involved.

The study in JAMA Pediatrics, led by Jon-Patrick Allem, an associate professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health, is the first randomized trial to demonstrate that exposure to alcohol in social media drives the desire to drink. 

“We wanted to move beyond association to establish temporal order, that is to say, participants’ desire to drink came about after watching the content,” said Allem, who is also a core member of the Rutgers Institute for Nicotine and Tobacco Studies.

To do that, the team worked with YouGov, a provider of online market research and data analytics, to recruit a national sample of adults ages 18 to 24 and randomly assigned them to one of two “feeds.”

Each participant watched 20 short Instagram posts from lifestyle influencers, designed to resemble a typical scroll. The posts for one group all included alcohol consumption or pro-alcohol imagery, such as holding a drink. The other group saw similar posts from the same influencers, matched for broad features like whether the influencer was alone or in a group and whether the content was sports-related or instructional, but without alcohol.

In one example Allem described, the first group saw the couple preparing dinner while sipping wine, while the others saw a similar kitchen scene where the couple happened to be sipping cocoa.

After adjusting for factors including daily social media use, lifetime alcohol consumption and previous exposure to alcohol marketing, participants who saw alcohol in the videos were 73% more likely than those who saw no alcohol to report increased desire to drink right after watching the videos.

Participants who rated the influencers as trustworthy, honest and knowledgeable were more than five times as likely to report a heightened desire to drink after seeing videos with alcohol.

"None of the videos were overt commercials for alcohol," Allem said. "It is something far more subtle than that. This is content people come across in their normal perusing of Instagram or TikTok, just the goings-on of daily life for the influencers in the video." 

The findings arrive as overall alcohol consumption in the United States has fallen to historic lows, driven in part by younger generations drinking less than their predecessors. Yet among those who do drink, heavy and binge drinking remain common.

"The positive story is that drinking prevalence is down," Allem said. "The unfortunate part is that those who drink are drinking quite a bit."

“Decades of research show that the earlier someone takes their first drink, the more likely they are to experience alcohol-related problems later in life,” said Alex Russell an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the study. He added, “Delaying drinking initiation is therefore a key prevention strategy. As online spaces like social media increasingly shape youth drinking behaviors, prevention efforts must also focus on these digital environments.”

The research, which builds upon Allem’s prior work connecting consumption of alcohol-related videos and alcohol use, was funded by the Rutgers Cancer Institute, reflecting a widening focus on alcohol’s links to cancer. Allem said that any amount of alcohol increases one’s risk of select cancers, particularly those along the gastrointestinal tract, like mouth, throat, esophagus, and colon.

The experiment doesn’t show whether a brief burst of desire translates into actual drinking, or whether repeated exposure over months changes behavior. 

Still, the trial adds experimental evidence to a debate over the role social media plays in the lives of young people. The field is stuck at the level of screen time, Allem said, a measure that ignores the effect of the content people see during that screen time.

“The online world has the ability to shape offline behaviors,” he said. 

Next, Allem said his team wants to test how different sources of alcohol content affect young adults, separating influencer posts from brand advertising and from peer-generated content, and to follow participants over time to better connect exposure to behavior. The goal, he said, is to build an evidence base that can inform how society thinks about alcohol marketing in digital spaces that are difficult to police and easy to access, including for people under 21.

“We want to be thinking about ways to reduce things in the environment that prime people to want to drink, that normalize it, that glamorize it, that put it in a positive light,” he said.

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