Psychologists say hoarding is a very human thing to do

SAN DIEGO — Selfish. Stupid. They’ve been called all sorts of things, the people who are descending on stores in a coronavirus-fueled panic to empty the shelves of pasta, beans, rice, meat, chicken, toilet paper, soap and other items. Greedy. Heartless.

Psychologists and behavioral scientists have another word for them: Human.

“When people feel uncertain, they tend to focus on things that bring them certainty,” said Uma Karmarkar, a neuroeconomist at the University of California, San Diego. “Most of us don’t have the ability to make new vaccines or enact new policies, but the one action that we can control, that feels like we are doing something, is to stock up on supplies.”

This is not new. Panicbuying happened during earlier pandemics. It happened after 9/11. It happens in advance of hurricanes along the Atlantic coast.

“It’s a natural response to a stressful experience,” said Lisa Kath, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University.

But the coronavirus is new. Its mechanisms and lethality are not fully understood. With hurricanes, people know what they’re in for, and for how long. They’ve been through them before. And survived.

“With this, we don’t yet know the boundaries,” Kath said. “We have no frame of reference. That just amplifies the fear.”

Amplified fear makes people go into a store and buy 12 rolls of paper towels instead of two. Four boxes of rotini instead of one. Three bottles of hand soap when there are already five at home.

It leads to scenes like this one at the Ralph’s in San Diego’s Mission Valley section on a recent morning, shortly after the store opened. An employee wheeled out a cart with a box of packaged chicken on it. He opened the box to put the chicken in a display case.

A shopper reached around him, into the box, and grabbed packages to drop into her basket. One, two, three, four ... . “We don’t have room in the freezer for all that,” a man who was shopping with her said.

“We’ll make room,” she snapped.

The panic-buying took off after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic on March 11. Additional spikes have followed other pronouncements by government officials, including the order Thursday night by Gov. Gavin Newsom telling Californians to stay at home except for “necessary activities.”

Grocery shopping is OK under the order, and Friday morning people started lining up outside a Vons in San Diego’s Clairemont section before it opened. Like other markets, it has put in place restrictions aimed at hoarding, such as limiting how much toilet paper, chicken, meat, eggs and other items people can buy. Within a couple of hours, much of that was gone anyway.