In a series of studies in the 1970s and ’80s, psychologists at the University of Washington put more than 300 students into a study room outfitted like a bar with mirrors, music and a stretch of polished pine. The researchers served alcoholic drinks, most often icy vodka tonics, to some of the students and nonalcoholic ones, usually icy tonic water, to others. The drinks looked and tasted the same, and the students typically drank five in an hour or two.

The studies found that people who thought they were drinking alcohol behaved exactly as aggressively, or as affectionately, or as merrily as they expected to when drunk. “No significant difference between those who got alcohol and those who didn’t,” Alan Marlatt, the senior author, said. “Their behavior was totally determined by their expectations of how they would behave.”

In a repeat of the session performed for a coming documentary, one participant insisted that she could not have been drinking because alcohol always made her flush.

“We told her that, yes, in fact she was drinking it,” Dr. Marlatt said. “She immediately flushed.”

Somewhere between personal preferences and social custom, moreover, the peer group asserts itself. In a recent study, public health researchers in New Zealand conducted extensive interviews with teenage girls in one of two cliques at a high school. Both groups associated drinking with uninhibited behavior  and that is what they exhibited. But one group considered being uninhibited to include making out, and the other considered it to include far more.

In their discussion, Dr. MacAndrew and Dr. Edgerton acknowledged that Western societies, and certainly the United States, send multiple signals on bingeing. At times, the signals cross, as when movies show spring-break binging as sunburned, sexy fun, while health pronouncements make it look like an orgy of near-criminal behavior.

At other times, cultural expectations and personal preferences reinforce each other. The hope that a wild session might “reveal new things about myself” or “allow me to act completely out of character” is widely echoed in literature, pop culture and drinking lore. If the research is a guide, those hopes should be self-fulfilling at some level.

Unless, that is, the binge goes beyond any reasonable definition of excess. Then the amount of tequila consumed matters very much  and poison is poison in any culture.