There’s danger in categorical thinking, yet it has defined much of beer’s recent history. Our brains, in fact, are hardwired toward this mental shorthand, as for much of human existence this categorical ability to make decisions quickly based on experience with similar things has meant the difference between life and death.
An article I read recently by Bart de Langhe and Phillip Fernbach in the Harvard Business Review hits awfully close to home on the subject. It outlines a few of the ways this type of thinking can manifest itself in the negative effects of compression, amplification, discrimination, and fossilization.
Compression is the tendency to treat members of a category as more similar than they actually are. Whether we’re talking about the taxonomy of beer styles or classes of craft-beer consumers, it’s easy to fall into this trap of oversimplification and not look at the broader complexity that makes up everything from lovers of certain styles of beers to the commercial examples that make up our idea of what those styles are. Under the magnifying glass, many of those assumptions don’t hold up.