Researchers come to an explosive thesis: Anyone who tended to hoard during the corona crisis and had large stocks should have a rather unpleasant personality trait.
During the time of exit restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic *, toilet paper became scarce: Many people felt the need to stock up on huge supplies of toilet paper.
Many supermarkets took drastic measures to stop uninhibited purchases.
To ensure that there was enough toilet paper for everyone, in many places only two packs per buyer could be sold.
Researchers are now looking at
what extreme hoarding says about our personalities
.
When the coronavirus pandemic reached Germany, not a few panicked due to the exit restrictions imposed.
Not least the empty supermarket shelves have shown: the outbreak of the hitherto unknown disease deeply unsettled people,
and fear drove many to buy hamsters
.
A German-Swiss research team took a closer look at the phenomenon and examined whether hoarding is related to the individual's fear of the virus and certain
personality traits
.
They published their results in the specialist magazine PloS ONE.
Who hamsters is conscientious and orderly - and also unstable?
An essential finding that the scientists concluded from their online surveys: The fear of being infected with the coronavirus and the creation of toilet paper stocks are closely related.
In addition, the study directors noticed
that extremely conscientious and orderly people
,
in particular, tended to hoard
.
"The subjectively perceived threat from Covid-19 seems to be an important trigger for hoarding toilet paper", quotes the science portal Wissenschaft-aktuell, the researchers around Theo Toppe from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig: "But we are still far from fully understanding this phenomenon. "
The researchers were particularly interested in the personality traits of the around 1,000 people surveyed online from Europe and North America.
In the survey, which was carried out at the end of March 2020, the scientists determined how many rolls of toilet paper the study participants had bought within the last two weeks, how many rolls they are currently storing in their apartment and how much they felt threatened by Covid-19.
In addition, the study directors drew conclusions on personality traits such as tolerance, conscientiousness, openness to experience, extraversion, emotional instability as well as honesty and modesty using a special catalog of questions.
Their results: the stronger the perceived threat, the greater the supply of toilet paper.
An increased emotional lability intensified the fear and thus also had an indirect influence on purchasing behavior
, as science-current reports.
(jg)
* merkur.de is part of the nationwide Ippen-Digital editors network
.
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