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Hoarding, stockpiling, panic buying: What's normal behavior in an abnormal time?
Hoarding Isn’t About Stockpiling
Hoarding is a serious psychiatric disorder which has been witnessed by doctors for centuries, and is not some behavioural trait of otherwise normal people.
Symptoms of this disorder start from adolescence, and later become problematic.
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Key Ideas
A compulsive behavior
It involves actions a person feels driven to do over and over again.
Compulsive actions may appear to be irrational or pointless, but the individuals may feel incapable of ...
Compulsion vs. Addiction
A compulsion is an overwhelming desire to do something. An addiction is a physical or chemical dependence on a substance or behaviour.
Two key differences between compulsion and addiction:
- Pleasure. Compulsive behaviours rarely result in feelings of pleasure. People with addictions desire the substance or behaviour because they expect to enjoy it.
- Awareness: People with compulsive disorders are typically aware of their behaviours and bothered by the lack of logical reason for doing them. People with addictions are unaware of or unconcerned about the negative consequences of their actions.
Compulsion vs. Habit
- Habits are repeated actions that must be consciously initiated. Eventually, the process becomes subconscious and automatic: for example, when you are brushing your teeth.
- Unhealthy habits can become a compulsion or even an addiction. For example, the good habit of regular exercising can become an unhealthy compulsion or addiction when done in excess.
The difference between a compulsive behaviour and a habit is the ability to choose to do them.
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Key Ideas
Panic Buying
The world is seeing panic buying in supermarkets, with items like toilet paper, milk, soda, hand sanitizers, etc. flying off the shelves, especially in places with confirmed cases of the virus.
...Downsides of Panic Buying
- Panic buying makes people feel in charge of the situation, while seemingly mundane measures like hand-washing, which are actually impactful, seem ordinary.
- The problem comes when people overbuy in their over-panicked state of mind (irrational stockpiling), making the shortages worse than they really are.
- Speculators also take advantage of panic buying and raise prices of essential items like face masks, forcing companies to take appropriate measures.
Loss Aversion
..is a principle which makes people do things so that they don't feel regretful later.
People are panic-buying for the same reason too, with social media and news media amplifying the sense of scarcity.
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Key Ideas
The obsession with toilet paper
While fighting the new virus, people seem to have got obsessed with toilet paper. However, hoarding toilet paper is nothing new. In 1973 and in 2013 the USA and Venezuela had already gone throug...
People's need to hoard toilet paper
Even though the US has been mass-producing toilet paper since the late 1800s, people still seem to have an issue with this very product and, therefore, buy it in huge quantities, especially during pandemic times.
This is known as 'zero risk bias' by risk experts and it describes a person's behavior when trying to eliminate a superficial risk entirely rather than just reducing a big risk, everything in order to feel safer.
Successfully dealing with shortages
While we are all facing the biggest challenge of our life, the 2020 pandemic, our behaviors are slowly starting to change. For instance, hoarding toilet paper is not something common, at least not in modern societies. Still, it is happening worldwide these days.
Among the most efficient ways to handle shortages of any kind, shops could introduce rationing certain products or even individuals could try and convince each other that there is no real need to hoard staff, such as toilet paper, as we are not talking about unlimited resources here.