This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagata.

Volunteers in scientific studies sometimes get compensated.

The payment can be cash, a gift card, or something almost worthless.

It's amazing what people will do for a lollipop when they've had a few drinks.

Simon Moore is a professor of public health research at Cardiff University in the UK, and the lollipops were for people

who agreed to blow into a breathalyzer while out on a Friday or Saturday night in Wales.

More than 1,800 people agreed to the exchange and the scores covered a wide range of alcohol intake.

So that would go from zero upwards. I think one of the largest scores we had was about 120, which is a near-death experience.

The researchers also gave a subset of volunteers a short survey about drinking habits and health risks.

Questions like, how drunk are you right now?

And how extreme has your drinking been tonight?

And they found that even very drunk respondents felt relatively more sober if they were surrounded by even drunker people.

In other words, our perception of intoxication and its risks is relative.

So this is the point as you change context, perceptions will change, although the absolute

level of alcohol in the system doesn't change.

The study is in the journal BMC Public Health.

Moore says one way to use this finding is for better city zoning.

In the United Kingdom for example there's been a big push to put more and more licensed

premises that sell alcohol in the same district in the same area and what this does

is create a concentration of drinkers so what we might argue from this is well let's try

and break that up a little bit. Have a mix of bars, restaurants, cafes and cinemas,

...