Study: People who hoard toilet paper are just looking for a symbol of safety

Enlarge / People who felt more threatened by COVID-19 and ranked high on scales of emotionality and conscientiousness were most likely to hoard toilet paper when the coronavirus shutdowns began in March. (credit: Emmanuele Contini/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Back in March, we reported on the strange phenomenon of people scrambling to stockpile toilet paper as the coronavirus pandemic led to widespread adoption of shelter-in-place and social-distancing policies. Now German scientists have pinpointed a couple of key personality traits that appear to be linked to this kind of hoarding behavior, per a new paper in the journal PLOS ONE.

Consumer behavior researcher Kit Yarrow told Ars in March that toilet paper hoarding is at least partly an attempt to gain a sense of control when the world feels uncertain and dangerous. "When we feel anxious, which I think all of us do right now-it would be sort of abnormal to not feel a little anxious-the antidote to anxiety is always control," she said. "And since we can't really control the track of this disease, we turn to what we can control, and that's why people are shopping. It's like, 'Well, I feel like I'm doing something, I feel like I'm preparing. I feel like I'm taking control of the thing I can control, which is stocking up.'"

As for why people hoarded toilet paper in particular, according to Yarrow, this kind of panic buying could be a case of our social primate brains reacting to newsfeeds full of striking but sometimes disorienting visual cues-like images of store shelves devoid of paper products. "Toilet paper sort of became the thing that the media in particular was really focused on, and that then cued people into thinking about [it]," she said.

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