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.”
I especially love the guitar riff at the end of Sheep.
Forget the toilet paper. Coronavirus is a really bad cold. Stock up on kleenex!
Gilmour took it to another level on that album, Roger is still a prick, though.
Now you are talking!
“It used to be when the SHTF people would use cigarettes as “currency”. Now it will be TP.”
Hello fellow Dallasite. In a real SHTF 22lr will trade like currency for sure, as will cigarette, booze, and females.
BINGO
Less Nessman:
“Oh, the humanity!”
That has to be the best episode. LOL
Who you gonna barter with Gator, otters?
https://twitter.com/otteritarian/status/1237808009310593028
:)
“SMH I don’t know what the hell it’s suppose to do”
I respect the honesty and hilarious admission of the human condition.
Very entertaining!
In the U.S., people are receiving conflicting messages.
If all else fails look what is going on around you and THINK.
Those who panic are the first to fail
So, Why hasn’t the big super markets imposed purchase limits on these items?? Back when the ammo was in short supply you could only buy 2 boxes of 22 ammo at a time. Why are we letting people buy entire carts full of TP??
Sheryl Crow just needs one sheet.........................
Two weeks worth of TP , China quarantine to break the chains of infection have lasted for 6 weeks and still running. If we hit 100k+ cases we will also need 6+ weeks isolation. At minimum you need two incubation period to break a virus chain and to verify it’s broken. That’s minimum really you need three periods this bug has up to a 42 day incubation on outliers and 24 days within two deviations of the avg of 14 days. So three periods of 24 is almost exactly what China is running with right now.
They have. Target and Walmart announced this morning limits on TP, Sanitizer and cleaning wipes..................
It’s a classic. :)
Do what they do in third world countries. Take a mason jar of soapy water and a wash cloth to the bathroom with you. And just remember when you are cleaning yourself up after going #2, the media and the Democrats did this to us!!!
I was at Menards in the west metro of Minneapolistan this morning. I took a cruise through the TP aisle just to see. EMPTY. All your TP are not belong to us.
My wife is at an HEB supermarket right now. She snagged a a pack of toilet paper for us. She didn't buy a cartful, but we thought we could use another 8-pack. She also stocked up on groceries. With all the talk of "we're 10-14 days away from where Italy is", I don't see how we won't get to a "shelter in place" situation for everybody.
Canceling the Houston Rodeo here is HUGE. the Houston Rodeo is not so much about cowboys ropin' and ridin' as it is about concerts from popular entertainers (the cancelation even included everybody's favorite fat-assed singer Lizzo!). The NBA cancelation adds more fuel to the panic fire. The Park and Ride where I was waiting for my carpool partner this morning was about 35% less crowded today and traffice was the lightest it's been all week. People are either starting to self quarantine or they are out panic-buying.
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