Social Influence and Problematic Drinking: Insights from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Patterns of alcohol consumption can spread from one person to the next in social networks. Yet the necessary conditions required for this social influence to occur are not clearly defined. Here we leverage the sudden and seismic shift in social life following COVID-19, a natural phenomenon that divorced social relationships from the contexts those relationships typically inhabit. Using a social network-based clustered longitudinal design, we examined alcohol use patterns among cohorts of heavy drinking friendship dyads and triads (N=314) traced longitudinally pre- and post-pandemic. In line with hypotheses, results indicated a disruptive effect of COVID-era on social influence effects-while friendships endured, longitudinal links between friends' and participants' problem drinking diminished significantly with COVID-19. In contrast to these inter-individual effects, intra-individual (i.e., autoregressive) links between participants' past and present drinking remained intact. Results inform the understanding of mechanisms undergirding social influence effects, pointing to a potential role for context.