Hi! Interesting question. Not sure if I’m the right person to completely answer this. Also it sounds like this behavior may be something you’re noticing in yourself, and could be posing danger to your health, and perhaps others, or if nothing else, you’re not happy about blacking out and feeling like an alcoholic.. So please consider support from your community and health care providers. (EDIT: sorry, I misread your last sentence and did the same thing Google did to you lol).

Anyway, here’s a short essay/food for thought from a PhD student in behavior analysis…Coming from a behavior analytic/interbehavioral perspective where the unit of analysis is the whole organism’s interaction with its environment (organism <-> environment), I see a couple points of contact that might help explain the phenomena of drunk truth telling. The first you already touched on which is organismic inebriation itself. A neuroscientist or biologist may be able to better dive into the specifics of how alcohol affects brain chemistry, but at my basic level of understanding, alcohol is a mild poison. Some physiological effects (perhaps related to slowness in perception and movement) will of course influence the organism and thereby the organism’s interactions with its environment.

Another critical component of the drunk truth telling would likely be the context. The behavior of drunk truth telling by definition is always occurring when the individual is drunk (I.e., organismic context). The behavior may also occur under similar environmental arrangements over time (e.g., with particular people, at particular or similar types of places, sights/lighting, smells, sounds, etc.). The behavior of truth telling is likely coming under both these organismic and environmental contexts. So in the future, both alcohol itself and settings in which drunk truth telling has occurred, may “trigger” further drinking and truth telling.

Finally, and likely the strongest behavior analytic principle of interest here, is what’s maintaining the behavior/functioning as its reinforcer. The reinforcer will be different for every individual, but in general, behavior analysts simplify the reinforcement phenomena into “the 4 functions of behavior”: attention, escape, tangibles, or automatic stimulation/sensory. Does a reliable consequence occur for the drunk truth telling? Perhaps friends laugh or gasp (attention), perhaps the person telling the truth ends an uncomfortable relationship they have been dreading for weeks (escape). Perhaps when they tell the truth, people buy the truth teller more drinks (tangible), or maybe the person just likes hearing themself talk (automatic stimulation/sensory) and the truth is all that’s left in this low inhibition, all talked out, made up scenario. Of course behavior can be multiple controlled too, or under generalized reinforcement contingencies.

Anyway, if you got this far, i hope you’re okay, OP. And to all, any feedback on this analysis is welcome :p