Photograph by
Michael Fajardo
South Bank University in London has spent £20,000 building a fake pub where psychology researchers can investigate people’s relationships with alcohol.
The pub will look and feel like a real pub with beer taps and and fruit machines, but researchers will be secretly replacing the alcoholic drinks of some volunteer students with non-alcoholic versions, and seeing how their behaviour differs.
These placebo drinks will taste and smell like their alcoholic counterparts, but will just not contain the alcohol itself.
The pub building will also have hidden microphones and cameras, so the researchers can monitor the effects of the alcohol or placebos on their subjects more closely, as they try to find out how and why people get drunk
