Is panic buying actually panicked?

Some of the most striking early images to come out of the early pandemic period were of empty supermarket shelves, or of people leaving shops with trolleys piled high with excesses of toilet paper, bags of rice, or bottles of water. The discourse around this often placed the blame on individuals, who were seen as at fault for irrational so-called 'panic buying'.

Whether or not these behaviours were actually motivated by the irrationality we'd usually associate with panic, however, is an important question. If scientists and the general public alike erroneously think of panic buying as something akin to herd mentality or uncritical contagion, we risk losing vital insights into what actually drives this disruptive behaviour, as well as opportunities to better mitigate it in future.

This problem is at the centre of new research conducted by a team from the UK and Chile, published recently in PLOS One. Analysing in-depth conversations with those who experienced panic buying, Evangelos Ntontis and colleagues pull out three key themes which characterise the behaviour, ultimately concluding that describing it as 'panicked' fails to capture the psychological experience which drives people to stock up in a crisis.

For this study, the team conducted semi-structured interviews with 23 adults who lived in the UK during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic which, as the authors note, was essential to ensure they'd had shared exposure to similar news headlines, government policies, and shopping experiences. Of the participants, 19 were interviewed individually and 4 as couples, and were variously employed full-time or part-time, or were self-employed, retired, unemployed, or in education.

Interviews took place in May 2020, addressing the impact the pandemic was having on participants' daily lives, their emotional response to what was going on, and how they felt about food shortages, pandemic preparation activities, and government announcements. To avoid bias, the team intentionally excluded the term "panic buying" from their questions. From here, they pulled out three themes.

The first looked at product shortages, preparedness, fear, and uncertainty — and, here, participants called into question the public perception of panic buying. Rather than equating panic with irrationality or loss of control, as some discourse suggested, participants described the "panic" seen during the pandemic as a result of tangible external factors like empty shelves and economic insecurity. Behaviours labelled as panic buying were seen as normal fearful responses to an uncertain, anxiety-inducing situation — not as a total breakdown of rationality, as the word 'panic' would truly imply.

The next theme looked at why people were influenced to increase their shopping activity during the pandemic. Here, participants pointed to media coverage and the behaviour of others; media reports, for example, were seen as amplifying concerns about product availability, leading people to buy more "just in case" of shortages that may never have come. Other participants described buying more than they needed because they feared others would buy everything first, creating a self-fulfilling cycle of increased demand.

Finally, participants talked extensively about preparing for shortages, with many buying extra supplies to guard against potential shortages, or to last through prolonged stays at home due to illness or lockdown. Again, this was framed as sensible future planning, rather than irrational hoarding.

The team believe that 'panic buying' is not an illogical and groundless behaviour, as might be inferred from the inclusion of the word 'panic'. Instead, their results suggest that such behaviour is linked to tangible and meaningful external factors. This misunderstanding can set up what they call "problematic generalised representations of human behaviour", which can become dangerous when used to inform media reporting and public policy. "Human behaviour is not irrational, but is controlled, adaptive, and imbued with social meaning," the team writes.  

It may therefore be useful to deploy more consideration in how we describe these kinds of behaviours day-to-day. Rather than using pathologising language, which may frame people's actions as inherently dysfunctional, thinking through the social context in which they are operating could give us a deeper and more nuanced insight into what happens in a crisis, and help us to better mitigate such disruptive group behaviours in future.

Read the paper in full:
Ntontis, E., Vestergren, S., Saavedra, P., Neville, F., Jurstakova, K., Cocking, C., Lay, S., Drury, J., Stott, C., Reicher, S., & Vignoles, V. L. (2022). Is it really "panic buying"? Public perceptions and experiences of extra buying at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. PLOS ONE, 17(2), e0264618. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264618

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