The Toilet Paper Scarcity Effect

I find many people astonished by the fact that people are fighting over toilet paper, when that doesn't seem as a vital product on this times of self-isolation (or imposed, depending on where you are). I want to help shed a little bit of light onto why is this happening, based on some behavioral science and psychology findings.

Extraordinary times

Before everything, remember that we are living in extraordinary times, which means our long term memories have no learned patterns of behaviors for this kind of crisis. The best models regular folks can use to anticipate this kind of situations are movies and narratives, which tend to exaggerate many aspects for narrative purposes, and leave out other potential problems because it could break their worlds. For example, is usual to see in apocalyptic movies that light and water services still run, even if there is no one there to keep them working, but every convenience store is depleted (maybe there are no more twinkies!). Of course, that is not our case, but I just want to point out that our whole idea of people scavenging for supplies could be a learned behavior from the media, as we start expecting others to do so as well. I will not assume the effects of media on our behavior, but my point is that our brains are not prepared to assume all this change at once, which creates a lot of uncertainty.

Heuristics and Biases

When people are offered hard choices were insufficient information is available, our heuristics kick in. Remember, heuristic are the rules of thumb our brains use to make difficult but quick decisions on the face of partial information. Heuristics help our brains spend less resources while making choices, so we won't paralyze amidst the decision. These heuristics tend to use available information from other sources to try to paint a complete picture, like your long term memory (what have I done in the past on the same situation) or on environmental queues (do I see other people doing the same thing?). This information tends to be biased: so many times we make incorrect and irrational choices that seem to have a rationale in the moment. So, as you might expect, in extraordinary moments like these ones, people will rely more on what they see other people do, than on what their experience have taught them, they will rely more on the collective wisdom, which might not be so wisdom-y in these times.

Biases based on probabilities and availability

The first kind of biases that affect people on these scenarios are based on our inefficiency of calculating odds. The availability bias, for example, shows that people tend to overestimate the odds of things happening when they see them more frequently. These has been the basis of a lot of climate change discussion, as the effects of climate change are not as "available" as other effects. People will tend to overestimate that more people die of car accidents than stomach cancers, just because you see more cases on the news. This effect has a profound impact on our social media world, were a single news can, by mere chance, get more virality and create more availability.

So, imagine that people start sharing the toilet paper scandal on their feeds. They might be thinking, these will help others stop the behavior, but that might actually reinforce it, as more people start overestimating the odds of toilet paper being scarce in the future. So you might blame others for the problem, but might go and try to buy some before the other crazy people takes them away. These creates a positive feedback loop where even more rational people are contributing to the problem, which creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. If everyone is buying all the toilet paper, is it smart or dumb to go and buy some for yourself? That's a hard question to ask.

Biases produced by scales and misread information

Our brains are great to read patterns by comparison, but, if you have seen how optical illusions work, you might know that sometimes is easy to trick the brain into thinking in the wrong scales. Let me explain this one even more anecdotally. Imagine that you go to the supermarket and you see that there is almost no toilet paper on the shelves, but there are plenty of canned goods still. This will create a sense of urgency: I need to buy that before someone else takes it! In reality, no one has been buying more toilet paper, the problem is that they take more space on the shelves! This means that every product bought will create a bigger hole on the shelves. But your brain will not measure the absolute number of products (this takes more energy), but will compare the visual ratios of the products.

In this moment, the environmental queue will tell your brain that you should be careful, because toilet papers will go out sooner. This is not true! You cannot tell that in the same space 20 packs of toilet papers can be stored, several dozen cans of beans fit as well. So people are buying more canned goods, but you get angry for the irrational behavior of all those other people buying all the toilet paper: you then take a picture, post it on social media and it scales up. You then buy toilet paper, even if you didn't mean to at first, because your brain predicts that these will be a problem in the future, so better be smart now, right? So yes, the disproportionate size of the toilet paper can affect individual behaviors, which can lead to mass hysteria...

Social Proof

The above could not happen if we didn't have a complex system of evaluating others actions. We are suspicious of the stupidity of human kind, which makes us act on a defensive mode, but we also try to learn from others behaviors, especially in new situations. This explains why you can find so much bad information on how to protect yourself from the Sars-CoV-2 (Covid-19 is the disease): you are seeking the wisdom of the crowd.

A typical case of social proof is, you see a sign that says "Don't throw trash here". Some experiments have shown that people might start throwing more trash there, because the signs serves as social proof that others do so as well. Social proof can diminish the effects of blame when doing behaviors that go against the social norm. A sign that says "99% of people don't even think of throwing their trash here", or "Six months have gone by without trash on this street" might have a more positive effect. Another one is, ask people if they prefer a to go to a restaurant full with people or an empty restaurant, and most people will prefer the one that is full: social proof.

In this case, when you see a post were you see that people are buying more toilet paper (because of the other biases), this can in turn become a behavior rule. Why? because, you might think, someone knows something that you don't! In this moment there is a mediatic war: those pushing the behavior of buying toilet paper by just showing they did, and those that are angry with the first group and are inviting not to do so. And these is funny in an unexpected way, so all late night shows have done at least one joke (and invitation) around the toilet paper issue. And these mediatic war creates even more availability, which is why, in turn, I'm writing this article, even if it's not about Gamification. The thing is, if you don't understand that this scarcity might just be an optical and cognitive illusion, it might just be too difficult to stop that viral trend and it will become a reality: the rate of fear propagation is way higher than the spread of the disease effects themselves in this hyper connected world.

Priming in Memory

Finally, each time you see more on this topic, you are priming your memory towards this issue, which will make you more prone to notice if your local store lacks toilet paper, even if they are missing other products as well. This might make you all more aware of this particular problem, which might distract you from other products going out, or other news that are more worth hearing. So be careful! This might be distracting you from more concerning matters!

More to research about

We can learn a lot from all of this. Extraordinary times push our rationality to the limits! I, for example, cannot imagine how this is being lived by medicine professionals, who are exposed 24/7 to these disease, and have an overinflated (but not to underrate) availability effect. Or the whole "don't panic" vs "this is severe" equation, were neither extreme is helpful, but we are constantly exposed to messages of both extremes. Or there is the understanding on how the actual way probabilities are being shown to the public can affect they way people feel.

To give a small example of the latter, people say that a 3% fatality rate is low, but, would you travel on a plain that you know has a 3% chance of killing you? Then there is the framing effect: should we talk about a 3% fatality rate, or should we talk about a 97% survival rate? Could the latter decrease the panic to much, to a point where people start going out to crowded places? Or, is people understanding that 3 in every 100 cases will die, or that you have a 3% chance of dying (which is not necessarily the same, as one describes a global impact, while the other creates a personal sense of safety or risk). And there is so much information in conflict, as the fatality rate changes if you consider unreported cases or not, or if you compare fatality rates of Covid-19 against fatality rates of ebola without talking about their transmission rates and the effect on the health care system.

I, for example, would also ask to know the increased fatality rate of other diseases when the health care system is oversaturated, which would increase the fatality rate indirectly as well. But, would that increase the panic and create more irrational behaviors? So, I will just leave one final thought for you: beware of you own conclusions, right now. We are living on an social experiment without precedents, and hopefully, will learn enough from it for when the next pandemic comes around.

PS: So, should you by more toilet paper? Probably not. It will probably be difficult to create a real scarcity problem with toilet papers and after the news get to a saturation value where people stop talking about it, you will probably find more toilet paper before you can use it. Maybe start finding ways to use your current toilet paper more efficiently, that might help.

On the other hand, this disease attacks more heavily urban crowded areas, so I don't believe farmers will have to stop producing food, for example, which means that food might seem scarce, but it will be replenished more or less quickly. But I'm not expert on the whole food industry so it would be better to find some experts information out there. You should give yourselves a pat-on-the back, 100 experience points and 1000 prosocial points for every non "panic-related" behavior you avoid: you would be relieving the system as a whole!