Posted on 03/12/2020 8:17:27 AM PDT by Red Badger
Panic buying has been rife amid the global spread of the new coronavirus, with consumers around the world stockpiling goods like hand sanitizer, canned foods and toilet paper.
The trend has seen stores ration products, with U.K. retailers limiting sales of hand hygiene products while Australian shoppers have seen restrictions on the amount of toilet paper they can buy.
Psychologists spoke to CNBC to weigh in on why our brains push us to panic buy — even when authorities are assuring the public there’s no need to.
According to Paul Marsden, a consumer psychologist at the University of the Arts London, the short answer can be found in the psychology of “retail therapy” — where we buy to manage our emotional state.
“It’s about ‘taking back control’ in a world where you feel out of control,” he said. “More generally, panic buying can be understood as playing to our three fundamental psychology needs.”
Those needs were autonomy, or a need for control, relatedness, which Marsden defined as “we shopping” rather than “me shopping,” and competence, which is achieved when making a purchase gives people a sense that they are “smart shoppers.” ‘Fear contagion’
Meanwhile, Sander van der Linden, an assistant professor of social psychology at Cambridge University, said there were both generalized and coronavirus-specific factors at play.
“In the U.S., people are receiving conflicting messages from the CDC and the Trump administration,” he said. “When one organization is saying it’s urgent and another says it’s under control, it makes people worry.”
President Donald Trump downplayed the impact of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak on Twitter this week, with a disconnect reportedly widening between the administration and U.S. health authorities. The virus is now present in at least 35 states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
More generally, a “fear contagion” phenomenon was taking hold, van der Linden added.
“When people are stressed their reason is hampered, so they look at what other people are doing. If others are stockpiling it leads you to engage in the same behavior,” he said. “People see photos of empty shelves and regardless of whether it’s rational it sends a signal to them that it’s the thing to do.”
“Sometimes there can be a lot of value in social knowledge — from an evolutionary perspective when we don’t know how to react to something, we look to others for guidance,” he added. “If you’re in the jungle and someone jumps away from a snake you automatically do the same thing. But sometimes that gets highjacked and you’re told to do something that’s not the right thing to do.”
While sales of hand soaps and sanitizers have soared in markets around the world since the outbreak began, consumers have also been stocking up on a somewhat surprising item – toilet paper. According to Dimitrios Tsivrikos, lecturer in consumer and business psychology at University College London, toilet paper has become an “icon” of mass panic.
“In times of uncertainty, people enter a panic zone that makes them irrational and completely neurotic,” he said in a phone call. “In other disaster conditions like a flood, we can prepare because we know how many supplies we need, but we have a virus now we know nothing about.”
“When you enter a supermarket, you’re looking for value and high volumes,” he added, noting that people are drawn to the large packaging that toilet paper comes in when they are looking to regain a sense of control.
Tsivrikos, like van der Linden, told CNBC the lack of a clear voice from authority figures was fueling the panic.
“The public is getting conflicting advice from the government and retailers,” he said. “So people mass buy. I blame the system for not having a unanimous voice on what we should be doing.”
However, Peter Noel Murray, a New York-based member of the American Psychological Association and the Society for Consumer Psychology, disagreed that authority figures had the power to calm the panic-buying trend.
“If authorities were to consistently say that this virus is not a problem it wouldn’t change anything,” he told CNBC via telephone. “Campaigns that are authoritative are not successful if they don’t tap into people’s behavior.”
According to Murray, cognitive and emotional responses were the two key factors involved in influencing our decisions during situations like the coronavirus outbreak.
“In this case the cognitive factor is cognitive bias, (which means) we tend to overemphasize things that are recent and very vivid,” he explained. “When there’s a plane crash people don’t fly, when there’s a shark attack people think all sharks are killers. That process makes us think that whatever the current thing is, it’s similar to some terrible thing — it catastrophizes our view of whatever this thing is.”
In this case, Murray said, people might be associating the coronavirus with a past deadly outbreak, like the 1918 Spanish flu that killed around 50 million people worldwide.
“On the emotional side, the answer is self-affirmation. In our minds we know one day we are going to be dead, and the mind deals with it through (seeking) control,” Murray said.
“There’s an over-representation of fear and people’s minds need to respond to those kinds of feelings,” he added. “The need for self-affirmation is triggered, and that drives us to do unreasonable things like buying a year’s worth of toilet paper. It overwhelms the knowledge that we don’t need to be doing that.”
“Well, as long as there in BACON..................”
DARN! I FORGOT ABOUT BACON!
I hope there’s some left at Costco today.
Down with Big Toilet Paper.
Buy a toilet seat bidet!
My local walmart was out of chicken noodle soup this morning...of all things. They had toilet paper, but out of most disinfectant supplies...
Because Chinese businesses instructed expats living in other countries to buy up all the surgical masks at the same time as China stopped shipping them? Empty shelves will absolutely set off a panic
Because people are sheep.
“Forget the psycho mumbo-jumbo, people are worried about being stuck in their house for two weeks and running out.”
I was thinking the very same thing. But you express things differently when you’re paid by the word.
We all should probably keep a 6 week supply at home.
But a lot of people live paycheck to paycheck.
I feel for them if they get quarantined.
Me, I’ve sealed the ark doors. It opens only for my kids, whether they are healthy or not.
Last week my boss was in denial, claiming it was just a cold. And someone else was stating they weren’t worried because their God was bigger than any virus.
I started to reply back that my God had proactively given me a brain that tells me things like, “Danny there’s a train coming, get off the tracks.” or “Danny there’s a virus spreading, maybe you should work from home.”
I’m fortunate that I can work from home as long as work allows it. They hadn’t modified their stance by this week, so I told them that I was coughing, which is true, and they told me to please not come in. Thus I’m working from home.
Wiped out!................
I am sooooo stealing that!.....................
It used to be when the SHTF people would use cigarettes as “currency”. Now it will be TP.
Hell, we dont need any GD virus to put an end to this economic growth we have had under this POTUS. All we need is to manufacture a panic.
They use............the left hand...................
“so like a nut case I bought 6 large packs...”
SMH, what the hell is that suppose to do?
Yep, so many have quit smoking now I see very few people doing it any more......................
Might be good for bartering.
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