University spends £20000 building fake pub

A London university has splashed out £20,000 building a fake pub so that psychology students can study how alcohol affects human behaviour.

South Bank Fake Pub London

London’s South Bank University’s psychology department has created a fake pub for its students at a cost of £20,000

South Bank University created the bar lab within its school of psychology and has designed the building to look as authentic as possible with beer taps, bar stools, beverages and even a fruit machine.

The high-tech room was built on the fourth floor of the university’s main building, complete with CCTV cameras, authentic lighting, music and pre-recorded background chatter played through hidden speakers to convince participants they are in a real bar.

While bar labs have been used to carry out research at a number of US universities, it is believed this is the first of its kind in the UK, according to The Guardian.

Dr Tony Moss, head of psychology, said he wanted to create the pub in order to test restrictions in as realistic a setting as possible, but where conditions could be carefully controlled.

While some drinks will be alcoholic, others will merely be placebo glasses which have been rubbed with ethanol to smell like a pub.

“The glass will smell of alcohol, but whether there is any actual alcohol in the drink will depend,” explained Moss.

Each experiment will have to be approved by South Bank University’s ethics committee and the amount of alcohol distributed will be controlled up to the drink-drive limit.

Breathalysers are stored under the bar and mobile eye tracers will be used to track precisely where candidates are looking, which Moss explained is useful to determine whether people actually read posters with information about how to consume alcohol safely.

“It is not the sort of research you can conduct in a real pub. There are too many other influences and a lack of experimental control”, he said.

“The beer pumps, too, are a prop. They are not hooked up to actual beer kegs. We are not going to be serving beer every single day and it goes off fairly quickly.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 19th, 2014 at 11:49 am and is filed under Headline, News.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Open all references in tabs: [1 - 4]

Leave a Reply