Just for fun! Wharton professor Jonah Berger’s new book, Invisible Influence, is about the unseen ways the people around you shape your behavior. The beer anecdote is a brief rundown of a study conducted at a brewery by consumer psychologists Dan Ariely and Jonathan Levav. They argue with their paper that people are highly motivated to signal their uniqueness, even when it comes to ordering a beer.
Source: Science of US, September 9, 2016.
The drive for differentiation is something most people feel to some degree, Berger argues, and the only sure way around it is to be aware of it, and then get ahead of it — say, by ordering first at a brewery.
INSIGHTS: Think you’ve seen this? Watch for it at your next social gathering. Apparently, not everyone is as brand loyal to their beer as we might think.