Categories (beer styles) help us like things more

Tom Vanderbilt’s You May Also Like:Taste in an Age of Endless Choice is an absolutely fascinating book, although it likely won’t leave you satisfied if you expect an answer to the question of why we like what we like. But he introduces so many ideas, like this one from an article in The Guardian: “With the internet, we have a kind of city of the mind, a medium that people do not just consume but inhabit, even if it often seems to replicate and extend existing cities (New Yorkers, already physically exposed to so many other people, use Twitter the most). As Bentley has argued, ‘Living and working online, people have perhaps never copied each other so profusely (since it usually costs nothing), so accurately, and so indiscriminately.'”

He gets around to discussing beer late in his book, and that might make its way into something I write. Meanwhile, a non-beer-specific thought from the final chapter, which is made up of a series of messages—a sort of “field guide to liking” in a world of infinite variety.

We like thing more when they can be categorized. Our pattern-macthing brains are primed to categorize the world, and we seem to like things the more they resemble what we think they should. Studies have found that when subjects look at pictures of mixed-race people and are asked to judge their attractiveness, the answer depends on what categories are used; a Chinese-american man may be judged more attractive than men in general but less attractive than Chinese men. Things that are “hard to categorize” are hard to like—until we invent new categories. We like things more when we can categorize them, and categories can help up like things more, even things that aren’t as good as we might like.

You could read this as an argument for more beer styles. Please do not show it to anybody with the power to make that happen.