Yeah, I Drink ... But Not As Much As Other Guys: The Majority Fallacy Among Male Adolescents‪.‬

Male high school students reported the frequency and maximum quantity of their alcohol consumption and estimated the drinking behaviors of their same-age male peers. Consistent with past research on pluralistic ignorance and drinking that has utilized more proximal peer comparison groups, participants believed that their peers drank more frequently and in greater quantities than they themselves did. Furthermore, perception of the maximum quantity of peer drinking was a significant predictor of participants' drinking. Examination of effect sizes indicated that differences between self-reported alcohol consumption and perceived peer consumption were significantly larger for abstainers versus drinkers, which suggests that researchers should consider how the presence of abstainers in a sample may magnify majority fallacy effects. Alcohol is the drug of choice among adolescents and its use is undeniably commonplace (Gatins, 2005; National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, 2006). For example, more than 50% of 8th graders, approximately 75% of 10th graders, and 81% of 12th graders have tried alcohol (Maney, Higham-Gardill, & Mahoney, 2002). Arata, Stafford, and Tims (2003) found that in their high school sample two-fifths of males frequently binged. According to the Monitoring the Future Study (Johnston, O'Malley, Bachman, & Schulenberg, 2005), 30-day prevalence figures for alcohol use during 2004 were 18.6%, 35.2%, and 48% for eighth, tenth and twelfth graders respectively; 30-day prevalence rates for having been drunk were 6.2%, 18.5%, and 32.5% among eighth, tenth, and twelfth graders respectively; and annual prevalence rates for having been drunk were 14.5%, 35.1%, and 51.8% for eighth, tenth, and twelfth graders respectively. While the highest prevalence for drinking and being drunk among high-school age adolescents is among twelfth graders (Johnston, O'Malley, Bachman, & Schulenberg, 2005), the largest jump in use occurs between eighth and tenth grade where prevalence rates of drunkenness more than double.