Does Drinking Behavior Grounds in Basic Values? Exploring Associations across Individual and Country Levels

The studies of alcohol consumption have been focusing on specific motives, and rarely addressed more general motivational structures, such as basic values, and even less often paid attention to the cultural underpinnings of such relations. The current study investigates associations between frequency of alcohol drinking with basic values and moderation of these associations by cultural values. Three hypotheses were tested using national representative samples from 21 countries of European Social Survey (2014):

(1) intrinsic motives, such as enjoyment seeking, expressed in hedonism values have the strongest and consistent across countries association with frequency of drinking, whereas opposite anxiety-based values, such as conformity and security are strong negative predictors of drinking frequency;

(2) extrinsic motives, such as social participation and conformity are manifested at the group level, therefore higher societal levels of growth (versus protection) values guide the effects of individual values on the self-enhancement – self-transcendence dimension, the dimension appealing either to particularistic or universalistic norms.

The results fully supported our hypotheses. In countries with higher protection values (conservation and self-enhancement), expression of individual self-enhancement values, related to recognition by a group, is related negatively to drinking, as drinking is not socially rewarded. In contrast to it, in countries with higher growth values, recognition is not related to expression of values and drinking habits, so the negative impact of self-enhancement values is weaker. In countries with higher protection values, people sharing self-transcendence values, i.e. appealing to universalistic norms rather than group-bounded, drink more than those who do not share self-transcendence values. Likewise, in countries with higher growth, universalistic norms are similar to group norms, so individuals high on self-transcendence do not drink more than those low on self-transcendence. We discuss an alternative interpretation of these results, applying a theory of drinking as a result of stress induced by individual-group value incongruence.