Amidst the introduction of one-punch laws and lock outs, the main concern has been the so-called alcohol-fuelled violence that goes with drunkenness.

But one anthropologist believes it is not a result of the booze itself.

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Dr Anne Fox has specialised in the study of drinking cultures in countries around the world for the past 20 years and has been looking at Australia and New Zealand.

She is the author of Understanding Behaviour in the Australian and New Zealand night-time economies, which was commissioned by food and beverage company Lion.

"Australians, like many other people worldwide, have a very pervasive belief that alcohol can transform your behaviour, that it's a transformative substance, that somehow there's this genie in the bottle that can make you behave a certain way," she told PM's Mark Colvin.

"Alcohol - as all of the scientific literature shows, which we've reviewed very extensively in the report - cannot be considered a cause of violence. If it was, we'd see uniform levels of violence among all drinkers."

Countries such as Iceland consume more alcohol than Australia but report less violence.

"They have a stronger culture of preloading, they have 24-hour bar opening, they even have high rates of gun ownership, but in Iceland there is almost no recorded violence," she said.

"It's simply not a violent society and they have no belief that alcohol causes violence, and therefore you really don't see any violence in Iceland."

Most of Southern Europe follows this pattern, according to Dr Fox.

While researching in Italy, Dr Fox witnessed heavy tension between rival gangs in a bar.

"There were quite burly, aggressive men in the bar and all of a sudden there was scraping of chairs being pulled back and all the men stood up and we thought, "Oh my gosh, we should get out of here quickly," she said.

The bartender's response to the seemingly inevitable brawl was surprising.

"[He] leaned across the bar and said, 'ragazzi, ragazzi' (boys, boys) and called them all up to the bar and poured them all a shot of whisky."

After Dr Fox asked him why he reacted in such a way, he responded with: "Because everyone knows alcohol calms you down. If there's a fight brewing, we give them alcohol," he said.

Alcohol cannot change a person's nature, make them violent

According to Dr Fox, alcohol "cannot hijack someone's better nature and make them violent" and the term alcohol-fuelled violence is not accurate.

She said the focus should be on the causes and triggers of violence itself.

"You find that most of the research is finding that it's not so much that alcohol causes aggression as that people who are already aggressive or have other underlying tendencies which predispose them to aggression, such as depression or bipolar disorder or schizophrenia or hyper-aggressivity, poor impulse control - these people tend to drink heavily," she said.

"This creates a sort of illusion of correlation that it's the alcohol causing the problem. But look, if 100,000 people go out drinking in the night-time economy on a Friday night and one person throws a punch, we call it alcohol-fuelled violence, but what about the other 99,999 people who were drinking at the time who managed to stay perfectly controlled?"

Dr Fox argued that inhibitions, commonly believed to be reduced when drinking alcohol, are culturally constructed.

"Your inhibitions are just social rules. Anthropologists for decades now have been finding through international cross-cultural studies that the way you behave when you're drunk is mostly the way that your culture teaches you to behave," she said.

"You can see across the world that people behave very, very differently, despite being morphologically similar human beings and drinking the same amounts of alcohol."

She said Australia has a macho culture.

"We see that it's not so much the patterns of drinking or the levels or consumption that determine how people behave, but other features of culture that are magnified through drunkenness," she said.

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