Alcohol

Recently a friend linked me this article on twitter. I think he was really just trying to justify his recent increase in drinking by saying that intelligent people did it but thats beside the point. The article has brought up a lot of debate with anyone that I have shared the article with, and I dont expect this time to be any different. One of the things that has been a major topics of debate is why do the people deemed intelligent drink more. The article says that it is a persons intelligence it's self not correlates of intelligence that cause people to consume more alcohol. To emphasize their point they present with graphs that control for most factors such as economic status, sex, and education. They even controlled for frequency of socialization with friends which was one of my guesses as to why more intelligent people drank more, that they had better social skills and therefore socialized more.

This then leaves the question of why in fact to more intelligent people drink more? What is it about intelligence that makes them drink more then their less intelligent peers? One explanation that I can come up with is that intelligent people know about the benefits of alcohol, such as red wine being good for your heart and overall health. The study also controls for education which is what I used to base my second explanation off of. While I originally thought that more intelligent people would attend college and would drink more while at college then their less intelligent counterparts who would be working. As I thought about it more my explanation changed into intelligent people would know how to manage their time better and because of this would spend less time on school work and studying and would have more time to imbibe alcohol. Im curious if anyone else can come up with better explanations, let me know in the comments.