What toilet paper panic-buying suggests about personal value change during pandemics.



While it isn't necessarily the greatest puzzle of 2020, one of the strangest must be the global panic buying of toilet paper during the coronavirus pandemic.

While the mass purchase of toilet paper, rehydration sachets and bottled water would make sense during a cholera pandemic; it flew in the face of reason for something largely understood as a respiratory infection.  I remember grimacing at the peculiarity of offering someone a couple of rolls as a thank you for some second hand toys donated to my three and four year old children during the early days of lockdown.

It was walking through the empty aisles of our local Sainsburys, in a slightly vain attempt to get supplies, that I realised a connection that made psychological sense. When people are faced with threatening or uncertain life-events, it can often lead to changes in their personal values.  

You may now sensibly find yourself wondering what on earth personal values have to do with toilet paper... Well, values articulate what is important to people in their lives and motivate behaviours, including consumer behaviours.  Significant life events can change the emphasis people put on certain values (even temporarily).  During experiences of war, migration, homelessness and other threatening experiences; people often increase the importance they place on a set of values called conservation values. Conservation values (conformity, tradition, security), emphasise self-restriction, preservation of traditional practices, and protection of stability.

It is security values that hold the key to the toilet paper conundrum (a sentence I never would have imagined typing in my wildest dreams!)  Security values fit into two major categories; personal security and societal security.  It is within personal security that one places importance on maintaining health and hygeine.  

When walking through our local supermarket, I noticed that not only had all the toilet paper been hoarded off the shelves but also all the cleaning products on the opposite side of the shelf.  The purchasing habits suggested an extension that reflected a broader focus on health and hygeine rather than just a focus on securing the increasingly finite resource of toilet paper.

As time has gone on, science is identifying the potential for links between the covid pandemic and an increase in personal security values, but as yet, I believe this is the first piece of writing to link the mass purchase of toilet paper to the changes in these values. :-) 

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