The observation was first made by Mickey Gilley in his song, "Don't the Girls All Get Prettier at Closing Time" in 1975.
Subsequently, it caught the attention of social psychologists who used scientific testing to gather evidence in support of the idea.
The freedom of potentially going home with someone in the bar is threatened as the night comes closer to ending, according to the reactance theory.
[4] Madey, Simo, Dillworth, and Kemper (1996) found the effect in a nightclub near a university, but only for participants not in a relationship.
They used BAC as a time varying covariate in a repeated measures design, with 87 participants at a beachside pub in Sydney, Australia on four consecutive Saturday nights, between 9 pm and midnight.