Hamstering has been particularly common since the pandemic. In an interview with Focus Online, social psychologist Jan Häusser explains why this happens and whether the Germans are really the front runners.
First toilet paper and pasta, later oil and flour: For the last two years, there have been repeated hamster purchases in retail. Why is that? In an interview, Jan Häusser, Professor of Social Psychology at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, explains why people behave this way.
FOCUS Online: Mr. Häusser, once asked directly: Why are we hoarding?
Jan Häusser: There are various reasons and motives. On the one hand, people have a high need for security and controllability in their lives and everyday life. This has been violated in various situations. For example in the Corona crisis or with the Russian attack on Ukraine. There is a high degree of uncertainty. People often respond by holding resources together. Because they are important to get us through difficult times.
What exactly do you mean by resources?
Häusser: It can be anything. Anything that helps me counter a threat. It’s been in us since the Stone Age, it was the appropriate stocks that you build up. But it can also be a social network that you build up. That’s an impulse that sets in very quickly in threatening situations. So when hoarding, we may be dealing with an impulse to gather resources.
Does that mean hamsters are evolutionary?
Häusser: The theory says that people in threatening situations are interested in keeping resources together for the time being. In other words, I don’t want to give away what I have. And you also want to accumulate more resources. In earlier times, this was actually highly effective behavior because there was no stable supply situation. We don’t even know that anymore these days. The average supermarket has thousands of products on the shelves. Even if something should be out of stock, there are numerous alternatives. In the last few decades in Germany, we have not had the experience at all that any important good is scarce or no longer available.
So hoarding is still firmly embedded in our brains?
Hausser: Exactly. This behavior of accumulating resources is apparently still so strong in us that we do it in response to a threatening situation. Nowadays it is actually no longer functional to act in this way. This has to do with the fact that many of the stress reactions that existed in the past no longer match the threat situations we face today. It used to make sense to run away from a saber-toothed tiger. In a modern threat situation like a job interview, that doesn’t help much.
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They spoke of several reasons and motives. What else is there?
Häusser: If people experience a good as scarce or unavailable, then the value of this good increases subjectively. Advertising takes advantage of this. You probably know this from booking platforms, where it always says “There are still three hotel rooms and four other people are looking at it”. Everything that is considered “scarce”, so to speak, is subjectively perceived as more valuable. But this hoarding quickly leads to a self-reinforcing process. That means some people start stocking up and now a commodity is actually becoming scarce as a result. This in turn increases the value or attractiveness. With toilet paper at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, bottlenecks were easy to observe. Objectively, there was never any question of any supply chains collapsing. Still, the shelves were empty.
The self-reinforcing process you describe is not necessarily rational behavior. Why do people act like this?
Häusser: It’s not rational at first, since goods like toilet paper weren’t in short supply. The problem is that at some point it actually becomes rational to behave like this: once the shortage has set in, you have to go and stock up, so to speak. It’s also totally surprising why it was toilet paper back then, there’s no good explanation for that yet. Partly it is a matter of coincidences, partly you can imagine how unpleasant it is not to have certain products.
This was clearly noticeable at the beginning of the pandemic. Why did people in Germany hoard so much?
Häusser: I don’t know if the Germans really hoarded the most. There is also anecdotal evidence from other countries: in the USA, for example, there was a lot of hoarding, especially toilet paper and weapons. There were also reports from other countries. One trait you can use to predict is to look: How much do I trust the people around me? If I know, for example, that my neighbors only buy as much toilet paper in the supermarket as they need, then I actually have less reason to hoard than if I don’t trust them. If I feel that someone is being selfish and buying up the whole store, it follows that I must do the same.
Your colleagues from the University of Münster conducted an online survey in several countries. You write that older people in Europe in particular have mainly hoarded toilet paper. How then can this be explained?
Häusser: That’s easier to explain. Certainly some of them experienced the Second World War and the immediate post-war period and learned that important goods are scarce. It is also interesting that the supply situation there is actually relatively saturated, if the hoarding was really mainly in Europe. In countries where there are frequent shortages, very few will have started hoarding despite Corona or the Ukraine war. It’s kind of a permanent state that you can adapt to.
So people in Europe are just not used to things becoming scarce?
Hausser: Exactly. With both Corona and the Ukraine war, we have a situation that came as a complete surprise to many. This is a very strong threat for us: We don’t know about it and cannot assess it. In such situations one automatically asks oneself: What does that mean for me and what can I do for myself? There we are again with resources that need to be accumulated. It’s also about what you can do to be able to control this situation again.
