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Recently, I was shopping online and noticed an item I had considered purchasing. The item description indicated there were three left in stock, while the description of another similar item did not indicate how many were in stock. Immediately, I had the urge to buy the item that seemed scarce rather than the other. This struck me as kind of irrational, and I suspected it might be a marketing ploy that was working rather well in getting me to rush into buying.
I’ve been thinking about this concept lately because, in the past week, gasoline has become a commodity perceived as scarce throughout much of the eastern U.S. While news of the Colonial Pipeline hacking may have triggered some shortages, the largest contributor to difficulty finding gasoline is that the perception of scarcity has led people to panic-buy and hoard. This follows a series of related episodes over the past year, largely caused by perceptions of scarcity: hand sanitizer, toilet paper, paper towels, flour, pasta, and various canned goods, among others. There appeared to be a pattern of people hearing there was a shortage and stockpiling far more than they could use.
What leads to this recurring tendency to buy, stockpile, and hoard when we perceive scarcity?
In the context of the pandemic, this behavioral pattern is likely connected to our emotional response. While pandemics have occurred throughout history, most of us were not aware or alive the last time a similar one occurred. Consequently, we are experiencing heightened fear and loss of control. This sense of loss of control frequently leads people to latch onto something that feels in their control. This results in pursuing the scarce items with tunnel vision and singleness of purpose, regardless of whether it is in our personal and collective best interest.
Psychologists have studied decision making within conditions of scarcity and found that scarcity consumes attention, working memory, and executive function and elicits many counter-productive behavioral responses. In other words, when we perceive something to be scarce, we stop thinking rationally and our emotional brain takes over. We may find ourselves emotionally locked into obtaining the perceived scarce items and lose our sense of altruism and appear to focus on our own self-interest. Ironically, in responding to these emotional reactions, we actually make our collective problem far worse. Hoarding creates a problem of greater scarcity where there was unlikely to be one otherwise. In operating out of apparent immediate self-interest, we ultimately make the situation worse for ourselves. If we had stepped back to consider the situation from a calmer and more rational perspective, we would likely have concluded that the perception of scarcity was likely greater than the reality. Considering the collective good, only buying what we need would reduce or eliminate the scarcity altogether.
