How Cultures Panic. What the Coronavirus Teaches Us.

Longread. Updated 15 March 2020.

It’s 3.57 pm on Wednesday 4th March 2020, at my local Edeka Xpress supermarket in Bogenhausen, a comfy inner suburb of Munich. Before me stands a stack of toilet paper.

A tall, peaceful, undisturbed stack of toilet paper. 

I scour the supermarket to find a shortage of something. UHT milk? Well stocked. Tinned vegetables? Fine. Frozen pizza? Check. And most important, plentiful beer. In Bavaria, confinement at home without beer would be unthinkable.

Contrast this gentle scene with other supermarkets around the world. The press and social media abound with stories of hoarding hysteria. Some nations appear to stay relatively calm—even complacent. Yet others panicked. Why? 

Clearly, it’s a matter of culture. 

Culture drives our gut instincts. It powers visceral reactions to new situations. It orders our priorities. It tells us what’s right and wrong. It tells us to where to click. 

Managing COVID-19 will challenge health authorities across the planet. It’s a global concern, involving healthcare, logistics, government services and new protocols for many private and public behaviours. A response demands greater unified action than the 2008 financial crisis; yet even modest attempts at a pandemic consensus seem absent.

The global financial system is mechanically interlocked, so the 2008 response was easier to co-ordinate. Healthcare systems—and our attitude to health in general—change the moment we cross a border. Those in charge of community safety must manage it on the ground in different ways, acknowledging that humanity varies enormously from one culture to another.  

The pre-eminent way to measure such differences is through the cultural dimensions pioneered by the late Geert Hofstede. Many will know them already. 

1. Power Distance (PDI): Is a culture egalitarian, or hierarchical? What is a culture’s attitude to authority?
2. Individualism (IDV): Does our strength lie in ourselves, or are we strong because we’re part of something bigger?
3. Masculinity (MAS): Do we value assertiveness, competition and winning, or contentment and quality of life? (It doesn’t specifically refer to gender.)
4. Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI): How comfortable are with the unknown? How carefully do we assess risk before we act?

Each dimension has clear application to current circumstances. In his book The Seven Images of National Culture, Huib Wursten looks at the interplay of these cultural forces to paint a vivid picture of how nations behave overall.

Using these tools, let’s look at three countries and their instincts over the last week. Toilet paper tells a revealing tale.

Australia. A Culture of Contest.

By now, we’ve all seen the viral video. Authorities in western Sydney are calling for witnesses to an altercation in which two customers came to blows over dwindling stocks of toilet paper. In Tamworth, police tasered a 50-year old man in a scuffle. Pictures of empty shelves and bulging carts bloomed across social media. At least one Brisbane supermarket stationed a security guard near their toilet paper stock. Melbourne-based online toilet paper brand Who Gives a Crap reported sales surging over 800% in Australia, with wealthy Sydney suburbs such as Mosman and Balmain over-indexing. Major Australian retailers have imposed purchase limits, which some have called rationing.

Wursten calls English-speaking nations like Australia Contest Cultures. Such cultures are egalitarian and highly individualistic. They’re Masculine, in that they value assertiveness and dominance. And a low score in Uncertainty Avoidance means they don’t generally shy away from unknown risks.

A keyword in Contest cultures is competition. It’s natural to see life in terms of winners and losers. Strongly Individualistic, these cultures take personal responsibility seriously; you’re expected to look after yourself and your close family. Assertiveness holds little stigma; indeed, it’s expected in order to get ahead in life. Wursten describes these cultures as winner-takes-all. If I need toilet paper, I assume I must obtain it at someone else’s expense.

(The United States, another Contest culture, yields a vivid example of this mindset. President Donald Trump reportedly offered German laboratory CureVac a considerable sum for exclusive access to the vaccine they are developing.)

Viewed in this light, Australian consumer behaviour starts to make sense.   But the individualism and assertiveness of English-speaking countries tells only part of the story.

Contest cultures, arguably, can be seen as not just assertive, but impulsive. A combination of egalitarianism and individualism means, too, that social checks on personal behavior hold less power. 

Further, Australia scores relatively low on Hofstede’s Uncertainty Avoidance—that is, Australians tend to act before they’ve fully calculated what the risks are. 

In some cases, this combination proves a good thing. Australians took personal responsibility and leapt into action to help their neighbours in the recent bushfire crisis. They put caution on the back burner. Lives and property were saved as a result. 

Outsiders might look on Australia’s great toilet paper panic as a sign of anxiety or over-caution. But that misinterprets the cultural cues. Rather, one could argue that it’s a sign that Australians have a strong impulse to act, and act fast.

Supermarkets were created for the Contest culture of the United States. Their inventors designed them to be visceral places, even mildly hypnotic, set up to provoke purchases on impulse. In a Conflict culture like Australia, in a visceral environment like a supermarket, dwindling stocks were a cue to do something, and do it now. 

One can speculate that Australia is particularly prone to such reactions in early 2020. After months of non-stop emergency, perhaps Australians are still in high adrenaline mode. How does one react to a new emergency, when one is still on edge from the last one? 

Wursten notes that Contest cultures admire strong leadership which makes fast, decisive moves. Australians have been disappointed, even angered, at current Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s complacency in crises. So strained is Morrison's credibility that it has caused many to lose faith in institutions generally, which hitherto had been workable and pragmatic. The 2019 Australian Election Survey showed that just 25% of Australians have trust in government, the lowest level in the survey's 30-year history. This adds to the tension.

Germany: The Well-Oiled Machine.

English speakers love the precision of German words. In the COVID-19 crisis, we’ve latched onto Hamsterk?ufe. 

By now, most know the metaphor; one shops like a hamster, stuffing as much food into one’s cheeks as possible to carry home. Metaphors aside, the English translations can mislead. 

Many media outlets have used the term panic buying, arguably legitimate in some cases. But generally, Hamsterk?ufe has much less severe connotations. German speakers often use the word as an ironic comment on Germany’s archaic shopping-hour regulations; stores are closed on Sundays and holidays, so the rush to stock one’s larder before a long weekend sees a Hamsterkauf. 

That’s precisely what many Germans have done. They’ve brought forward a routine Hamsterkauf. 

The Federal Office of Civil Defense and Disaster Assistance (BKK) has long advised households to maintain a 10-day supply of necessities, and their guidance document is sometimes known as the Hamsterliste. Enterprising types have scaled up the list to a 14 day supply in response to the COVID-19 incubation period, and published it with links to suppliers. It’s human nature to neglect such preparations until prompted; the comparatively modest surge in demand could be seen simply as householders who topped up existing cupboard stocks.

German public broadcaster ARD tracks public opinion monthly through its ARD-Deutschlandtrend survey. Though there have been changes in the last poll, 76% remain calm in the face of COVID-19. While 75% are washing their hands more regularly, only 11% of Germans say they’re buying large stocks of groceries in preparation. 

“The consequences of fear can be far greater than those of the virus itself. Therefore, it’s good that with a few exceptions, citizens reacted in a sensible way,” commented Health Minister Jens Spahn. “Last week, some people stocked up with durable food and toilet paper; some supermarket shelves were temporarily empty as a result. Most of the shelves are now replenished. I am not saying this to put aside all fears and worries, but to put the situation into perspective…We know from our everyday life: we best tackle challenges with a cool head. This also applies to the handling of the corona virus.” (author’s translation)

Why such a dramatic difference between Germany and Australia? In cultural terms, the two nations share much in common: they’re egalitarian, individualistic, and assertive. But the two nations differ in what Hofstede calls Uncertainty Avoidance. Germans, and other individualistic nations which are averse to uncertainty, take a great deal of care to assess risk in meticulous, rational terms.

In a video interview, Gert Gigerenzer of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development gives the following advice for COVID-19. “Relax. Try to avoid dying of the things you probably will die of. That would be things like an ordinary case of the flu, smoking, or people you see on the street who insist on using their smartphones while driving.”

Nonetheless, German consumers are quietly concerned.

Aldi regularly advertises hand sanitizer at the beginning of March, to coincide with travel season. Naturally, this year’s ads hit with greater force, and the chain reported a “rush”. In most places, this was met with an orderly queue (see the Twitter feed in this link). No supermarkets report incidents of the kind we saw in Australia. 

Yesterday, tabloid magazine Stern commented on a video of the door rush at an Aldi in Kiel, in the north-west of Germany, the region with the most COVID-19 diagnoses. (As rushes go, it was pretty mild; one can find far worse crowds any Black Friday across the USA.) In its own video, Stern sourced earlier footage which proved crowds outside Kiel Aldi were not all that uncommon; they urged viewers to put the scene in context, and declared the beat-up to be fake news. Nonetheless, Aldi Nord limited purchases to three per shopper, and made that decision even before the exact demand was known.

In a well-oiled machine like Germany, one panics only when it makes sense.

But making sense takes time—often time we can ill afford. On March 9, Spahn told the Deutschen Presse Agentur that people have been too slow to cancel large events, such as Bundesliga games. Even the best oiled machine moves slowly.

Now, the full risk has been assessed. Chancellor Angela Merkel, a scientist herself, announced to the nation that up to 70% of the nation will contract the virus. That’s will, not could.

Efforts will concentrate on slowing the rate of infection, so as to spread the burden of caring for acute cases over several months. Germany has a low death rate, in spite of a significant number of confirmed infections. The strategy may, indeed, be succeeding at this early stage.

In the same press conference, Spahn explained his decision not to close schools, kindergartens and child-care centres en masse: looking after housebound children would cripple the country’s ability to weather the crisis. Nurses, doctors, police, and those who provide public services would be forced to stay home, or worse, would need to place the children with grandparents. 

To many, this could sound heartless. In a Machine culture, a hard, precise evaluation of risk makes the rules.

Spahn and his colleagues, arguably, have a good case from the examples of Taiwan and Singapore, which elected not to close schools and workplaces. But as positive tests mounted, many local jurisdictions thought with their hearts rather than their heads. A mere three days after Spahn's announcement, ten of Germany's sixteen states closed their schools. Experts who've done the maths may judge risks, but the cogs in a Machine culture remain human.

Japan: A Special Case.

Like Germany, Japan is a highly uncertainty-avoidant culture. And it has its own version of the Hamsterliste. In fact, it has two.

There is an emergency stockpile list, (備蓄品 / bichiku hin), and an emergency bag list (非常持ち出し袋/ hijyo mochidashi bukuro). National Broadcaster NHK lets you print the list in your choice of five colours, so you can iron it onto a tote bag—one each for home, office and travel. (“How Cool!” the website exclaims.)

One may notice that while these lists contain sanitary wipes and portable bags to be used as makeshift toilets, none include toilet paper.

Let’s imagine earthquakes, tsunami or typhoons, three of the most likely disasters for Japanese communities. In each case, a good many will be stranded in homes that are safe, but whose plumbing may feed into municipal systems under stress. Improvised toilet paper—soft tissues or paper towels, for example—can burden damaged sewerage pipes even more. The Tohoku Earthquake of 2011 brought home the point; many inland homes stood habitable after the quake itself, but their plumbing put exceptional demands on tsunami-ravaged waterfront processing plants which channelled waste to sea.

In 2014 the Japanese Government, supported with understandable enthusiasm by local paper manufacturers, began a campaign which encouraged citizens to include toilet paper in their bichiku hin. This was prompted not just by the recent experience of 2011, but also by memories of the run on toilet paper during the oil crisis of 1973. Japanese paper manufacturers are concentrated in the Shizuoka region; an earthquake there poses a significant danger to supply.

Authorities made a concerted effort to keep toilet paper top-of-mind. Does this explain the comparatively large run on toilet paper in Japan? In part, certainly. But other factors come into play.

Outsiders often underestimate the sheer physical constraints of a Japanese home. Even in the largest houses or apartments, space commands a premium. A large stash of toilet paper squanders it. As part of the campaign, paper manufacturers developed a special pack of tightly rolled single-ply paper, which cut required storage space in half. Nonetheless, if you’re updating your disaster kit, toilet rolls may be the first thing to bounce off the list. In recent weeks, Japanese consumers are likely catching up.

Japanese authorities recommend disaster kits contain supplies for 72 hours. This assumes three days is the probable maximum time you will need for rescuers to find you after an earthquake or typhoon. Likely, you’ll be in an evacuation centre, provisioned with food and other necessities, including toilet paper. COVID-19 presents a different scenario.

Japan is not a particularly collectivistic place, but it’s certainly not as individualistic as a Contest or Machine culture. There is a firm belief in Japanese culture, that safety lies in community, neighbour helping neighbour. The system is designed for it. 

Under these circumstances, confinement at home feels counter-cultural. And long confinements—the kind which require, among other things, toilet paper—are reasonably rare. How will Japanese people, as a nation, cope with isolation from each other? 

Culturally Decoding an Empty Shelf.

Early afternoon on Friday March 5th, I visited the REWE City supermarket in Munich’s Glockenbachviertel. 

Hygenic wipes were in stock. But hygiene spray was out. Soaps of every kind were plentiful, including some antibacterial soaps. Only one other facing, usually neglected on the bottom shelf, lay empty. It was labelled Arztseife, or doctor’s soap.

“I don’t usually keep hand sanitizer at home. But now I do,” remarked the pharmacist at my local Bogenhausen Apotheke. “Most people bought a single bottle, like me. But with so many more customers, that means drugstores are out of stock. The Health Minister [Spahn] has reassured us that these products are made in Germany, and the supply chain will be full again in a few days.”

This pattern appears to apply in Japan, too. Notwithstanding that some households clearly are prone to hoard, research showed the majority of the empty shelves witnessed in Tokyo after the 2011 earthquake were the result of a large number of households making small extra purchases, not people pressing the panic button.

Modern supermarkets everywhere are designed, deliberately, to almost run out of stuff. We know the system as Just-In-Time Delivery or a Lean Supply Chain, and we can trace its origin back to Toyota in Japan. JIT recognizes that inventory is expensive; better to deliver stock several times a day than waste real estate on warehousing it. Most supermarkets across the globe receive a daily delivery; a Japanese 7-11 in a high traffic area might receive deliveries up to seven or eight times a day.

A supermarket, no matter where it’s located, is highly sensitive to small upticks in demand. Even a modest number of extra consumers, buying a small amount, will empty a shelf. When a large number of consumers enter a product category for the first time, it can fully empty a supply chain; that’s what happened with hand sanitizer, a product which relatively few households held. Online retailers are even more responsive to changes in demand; the algorithm raises prices automatically. This can exaggerate perceptions of shortage.

We see this effect especially in low-interest categories: cleaners, detergent, paper towels, and—of course—toilet paper. Shoppers buy it when they need it, not when they want or desire it.

Toilet paper is the consummate grudge purchase; it provides relief more than pleasure. Do I keep three kinds of toilet paper in the WC, say, because I might want to vary the sensation depending on my mood? Generally, no. But I may well keep a number of different frozen pizzas, chocolates or snack foods on hand. Consumers buy such foods impulsively, and retailers have set up the supply chain to respond as fickle impulses wax and wane. Indeed, marketers deliberately set out to cultivate impulse buying through promotion, and supply chains have greater elasticity to accommodate it. Arguably, more individualistic cultures (and that includes, by some measures, Japan) need to offer greater variety, and their retail structures feed those categories where variety most pays off.

A good way to predict which products will surge in a crisis is to see where generics and basic brands hold the largest share. Paper and cleaning products top this list; tinned legumes like beans and peas are common generic food items. These are classic needs-based purchases, bought steadily as they get used up. It's a low-margin, cash-cow, mature market. Their supply chain is rusted in place. In 2020, that supply chain finally needed some oil.

In many ways, an empty shelf is a sign of the system working to plan. But our gut instincts don’t think about systems.  The empty shelf, with no clue given when it may fill again, sends a different message in different cultures.

How to Manage COVID-19:

Right now, the world has bigger problems than toilet paper. 

Japan, Germany and Australia are but three countries. And like many places, they’ve only just begun to engage with the many challenges of COVID-19. We have much to learn from the experience of other nations, like China, Italy, and South Korea.

Culture sets the rules of the game for human interaction. If you’re a manager of people, messages or policy in the cultures we discussed—especially if you’re managing as an outsider—consider the following:

Contest Cultures, like Australia: 

• Assess risk properly. Like many countries, the USA (a Contest culture) has issued a blanket travel ban for flights from Europe. It echoed the the Middle East travel ban of 2017, which President Donald Trump imposed “until we can figure things out”. While travel restrictions are sensible, the policy was clearly instituted in haste. Neglect of risk, and an acceptance of impulsive action later, is a common pattern in Contest cultures—that's a product of low Uncertainty Avoidance and high Individualism. Wursten points out the willingness of low UAI countries to assume risks before they’ve calculated them—citizens of such countries bet on the upside return rather than the downside consequences. In a Contest culture, it's part of our canon: people who place longshot bets that pay off are looked on as heroes. Resist that cultural trope in 2020. Don't take long odds on everything being OK.
• Watch the bullies. In Contest cultures, managers often let bullying slide. Bullies get stuff done, don’t take no for an answer, and may (in the short term) lift productivity. But assertiveness needs to take a back seat to moderation in this crisis; it’s easy for an individual to cross the line from asserting one’s legitimate self interest, to selfishly grabbing more than one’s fair share. 
• Firm, clear rules. Establish policies that resemble rule-of-law, and make them firm. If someone in authority needs to say no, make it clear that it’s not a discretionary decision. Being subject to the power of another individual, as opposed to being subject to laws which apply equally to everyone, can be an affront to egalitarian individualists such as those who live in Contest cultures.

In Machine Cultures, like Germany:

• Centralise action and policy. Machine cultures’ low PDI means power is often distributed. The German federal government, along with many firms and other organisations, allow considerable local autonomy in decision making. But the virus connects us all, and uniform action protects us. Germany lost precious time as some jurisdictions acted while others delayed. Inconsistent school closures are another case in point.
• Over-communicate facts. In Machine cultures, which evaluate risk meticulously, more information provides maximum comfort. So far, the German government has done a good job of keeping the population informed, and mass panic has been avoided.
• Acknowledge the emotional component of risk. Risk is more than a number. When a difficult triage must be performed, it’s more than an objective calculation. It takes an emotional toll on those who must face the consequences—experience in Italy and China gives vivid examples. In a Machine culture, we can overlook this. Machine cultures keep emotions private, and are usually circumspect about sharing feelings; such habits may not prove beneficial to our sustained effort. Tend to emotional hygiene, as well as physical hygiene. 

In Japan

• Comfort rituals count. Japan’s systemic preparedness seems to have stood it in better stead than elsewhere. But the system was built for a different kind of crisis. Leaders and Managers in Japan may face a new kind of challenge. In a culture where communities are a source of emotional sustenance, what are the effects of long-term isolation from others? Physical social distancing is difficult to practice in normal Japanese life, but rituals around limited touch and preservation of personal space have developed in their stead. This enables a highly gregarious community to interact safely; what psychological hardship comes from curtailing these interactions? Can digital means fight this isolation, and the loneliness which may arise from it? Today, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike expressed reluctance to completely ban cherry blossom viewing in public places, stating "I think taking away the Hanami from Japanese is like talking away hugs from Italians." The absence of reassuring rituals may be the greatest cultural challenge in the coming pandemic. 

The first sentence of Geert Hofstede’s groundbreaking work Culture’s Consequences reads, “The survival of mankind will, to a large extent, depend on the ability of people who think differently to act together.” Those words never rang more true.

Many thanks to Huib Wursten, Courtney Tenz, David Chalke, Christi Degen, David Morley, Hamish MacKenzie, Anne Miles, Geoffrey MacDonald Bowll, Stanley Johnson, Lisa DeWaard, John Lee, Michele O'Neill, Daniela Kaneva, Brigitte Opel, and my husband Masa for support on this piece.