How many drinks does it take? This study asked participants how many drinks it would take to reach a legal limit of 0.08% BAC and what number of drinks they would need to have before they no longer felt safe supervising a child, swimming, bicycling, driving, and walking. Eighty-eight college students with a mean age of 21.7 years responded to a series of questions based on nationwide studies of traffic safety culture and drinking and driving attitudes conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the American Automobile Association (AAA). In addition, quantitative and qualitative estimates of participants' perceptions of drinking and driving risks at different BAC levels were collected, categorized, and compared to traffic data.

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How many drinks are too many drinks? This study explored this question from multiple perspectives. An earlier study of university students was expanded to a national adult sample of 191 adults. Participants were asked how many drinks they could consume before they would no longer feel safe engaging in everyday activities, including driving, biking, and walking. Compared to university students, a national adult sample generally considered activities to be unsafe at lower levels of alcohol consumption. This sample also tended to underestimate the number of drinks required to reach a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.08%. Some participants indicated an unwillingness to engage in activities if alcohol posed any increased risk, while others appeared to tolerate some added risk posed by alcohol consumption. Implications for risk perception and decision-making are discussed.

This study examined the influence of signal word on the interpretation of a product safety label in 1992 and 2004. It also examined people's ability to infer consequences from a label that did not explicitly state hazard or consequence information. Participants were shown a label with the signal word DANGER, WARNING, or CAUTION, or with no signal word and asked a series of questions regarding willingness to engage in certain activities with the product, perceived degree of hazard associated with engaging in these activities, perceived degree of hazard associated with not heeding the label, and perceived consequences of not heeding the label. Participants were able to infer the type of hazard and other consequence information that was not explicitly stated. Presence or type of signal word did not influence perceived hazardousness or perceived consequences and with one exception did not influence willingness to engage in certain activities. With one minor exception, there were no differences in responses between 1992 and 2004. In a separate analysis, hazard ratings, overall, were lower for signal words when presented second than when presented first.

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