The price of a pint — why some people will pay Craft Beer prices (Part Two) — Diary Entry 8
Motivations, behaviours and beer leaders
In part one we used cask dark mild as an example, examining differing understandings of price, and the sometimes parallel ideas we hold when it comes to deciding which beers are comparable. Part one isn’t required reading, but if you want to give it a look over before reading part two, click here: The price of a pint — why some people will pay Craft Beer prices (Part One).
We tend not to think about our drink orders being served with a side of goals, but they are.
Almost everything we do is motivated by a goal. Even a trivial act like ordering a packet of peanuts at the bar is driven by goal oriented behaviour. Maybe you were hungry, maybe you were bored, or maybe you needed to break a larger bank note and it didn’t seem worth it for your single pint.
Dramatic actions are more obviously goal orientated: quitting your job to take over a pub tenancy, for instance, or taking a course on cellarmanship (because you realised your old job in the city didn’t exactly qualify you to run a village pub).
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There are a number of theories as to why we drink alcohol, and who we are — mainly focusing on motivations. Arguably the most prominent is Cox and Klinger’s 1988 Motivational Model of Alcohol Use [1], which offers a biological and situational explanation. It uses your expectations (those handy reference prices from ‘Part One’ [2]), personality characteristics and the socio-cultural context you find ourselves in. It then uses them to argue that your motivation to have a drink competes with your other short and long-term goals.
To drink or not to drink, that is decided by the winner of your subconscious argument.
For example; will having a beer on the way home from work mean missing a family meal? Or would sharing a bottle of wine over that meal have any affect on your morning workout routine? A key consideration in both of those examples is: if it did negatively affect your other goals, would it be a price worth paying it?
So far I’ve been using the language of alcohol research literature — which is one of medicalisation and stigma. Although motivation models are used to explain healthy and unhealthy consumption, Cox and Klinger’s theory was originally published in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science (now the Journal of Abnormal Psychology [3]); an American publication founded to study mental illness.
Impressively, 34 years on, Professor Cox continues his research into alcohol consumption [4] but much of it [5] and the related work of others’ [6] [7], still appears in scientific journals dedicated to abnormal behaviours — such as Addictive Behaviour [8] and The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse [9].
This focus on clinically troubling alcohol consumption may be due to how truly serious the medical and social consequences can be, when changes from a healthy, sociable activity, to an addiction. But most countries continue to enjoy a drink without addiction affecting only a minority of the population, embedding alcohol in their cultural practices [10].
Now that we’ve said hello to the elephant in the room, the disproportionate body of research into the negative aspects of alcohol [10], let’s get back on track — why will some people pay more than £5 for a pint of dark mild, when they wouldn’t dream of touching one under £3?
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The Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) [11] argues that our intentions, and so behaviours, are set by three variables: personal attitude, perceived behavioural control and subjective norms. It’s a motivation model which focuses on our mental processing in a social context — you could say it’s a social cognitive motivation model, but that’s a mouthful.
Your personal attitude is the sum of your knowledge, attitudes and prejudices.
For instance, your attitude to spending £5 on a beer may include the belief the alcohol will relax you and that it will taste good, but it could also include a feeling that £5 is quite a lot to pay for such a weak beer.
Second, is your perceived behavioural control. Which may not be an issue in our example, unless amassing cans and Untappd (the Facebook for beer lovers) check-ins is pushing you into debt. If you feel you have to keep up with the Joneses, you may experience a sense of helplessness (sometimes called self-efficacy) when confronted with a new release, leading you to pay the price, even if you can’t afford it.
A lack of perceived behaviour control might be a factor in rare cases, such as those suffering from a compulsive buying disorder [12] or alcoholism — making it an abnormal or even clinically significant, behaviour outside the scope we’re looking at today.
Finally, we have subjective norms, meaning: what we think our peers think about the price. And It’s these social norms which bring us to Henri Tajfel, John Turner and their Social Identity Theory [13].
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Our social identities — the groups we belong to — are important to us. They provide us with a sense of belonging and pride so much so that we define ourselves by them, sometimes consciously and sometimes without knowing we’re doing it [14]. There’s also a growing body of research showing they’re good for our physical and mental health [15].
The world is divided into us and them, and beer is no exception. We have beer people, who take pride in what they drink and are interested in where it comes from, then there’s everyone else. The majority of people drink what they fancy, but usually stick to lager or bitter (which confusingly, doesn’t just mean the beer style of bitter, best [16] or otherwise [17]), and maybe a pint of Guinness around Saint Patrick's Day.
Within beer lovers, there are the real ale lot and the craft beer types, although there seems to be less of a distinction with the increasing popularity of cask beer. This along with the increasing popularity of cask beer, dark milds in particular, is causing the interesting discrepancy in their subjective norms (which can also be described as social norms).
Each group comes with its own set of social norms; injunctive norms: how we expect our peers to think and behave, and descriptive norms: how they really think and behave [18]. It’s largely through these norms that we self-stereotype ourselves into a group, this is referred to as self-categorisation and is a process so complex it has become a distinct but complementary theory to SIT [19].
When a new issue comes up; we first look to our group, or more specifically our group leaders for what to do [20] — for an indication of which norms to follow or which ones we’re about to adapt. That may be the lady who runs your favourite bottle shop, a trusted pub landlord or increasingly, a beer writer you see online.
Looking to them doesn’t mean being a lemming, nor does it mean idolising them for being special — they are simply the people who best embody what we have in common and what makes us different from outsiders [20].
The more representative of the group the more leeway we give them to move us in new directions [20]. That could be accepting a relatively high price for what has historically been an inexpensive style. Or it could mean rejecting the inclusion of these new, higher priced dark milds and placing them into a separate craft cask dark mild category and refusing to buy one, at least publicly.
But this could also be something new — it could be a shifting point in the norms of beer.
If a leader no longer represents their people on group level (that is, they exemplify what makes your group different from outsiders) this is because the group itself has moved on and they’ve left them behind [20].
What it means for you, whether you've decided to pay or not, is based on your goals. Which beer group are you motivated to be a member of — if any at all?
Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, by Kate Fox
