Or was it Charmin? Cotonelle? One of these names starting with a C.

Why let a good crisis go to waste? We might as well learn something psychologically interesting. I will not be able to do anything other than speculate about the hoarding of toilet paper – and speculate I shall. But I do have something to say about the psychology of disgust, which, as it turns out, comes often into play when people are facing epidemics.

(As an anti-dote, photographs today are the most enticing things you can imagine, Trilliums, the harbingers of spring, although, they, too, are white…)

We are actually not seeing hoarding of those toilet paper rolls in any clinical sense of the disorder. Hoarding (as a psychiatric condition) is defined by a persistent need to save things, serious distress when you have to get rid of them that interferes with your daily life, and clutter in your house to the point where your living space is no longer functional.

All across the world, independent of culture, people are panic-buying the stuff. Not dried meals, canned food, or other staples of the pantry, for the most part. Toilet paper! (And, as it turns out, pot in all of its variations, but that is a story for another day.)

How did we get there? Here are some suggestions: You are worried about safety and in need to feel in control, so you turn toward wanting to be prepared. Buying something big that is relatively inexpensive, doesn’t have an expiration date, so you’ll use it eventually, regardless of what happens, is an attractive option when you think of how you can prepare for potential lock down (people go, in other words, for the zero risk bias.) Once people start buying more than usual, the shelves get emptier. That signals to others that there is competition for something of value, so they pounce, too.

Add social media, that now cajole others to share their toilet paper, or post sometimes truly funny jokes about it, or show their cellphone videos of people physical fighting over it, and the signal gets amplified to the point where there isn’t a person around who doesn’t wonder if they have enough and pack their shopping carts should they be the first at Freddy’s after restocking. The repeat visual messaging clearly inflates a sense of danger and urgency.

It’s not the the actual threat of a dearth of the familiar hygienic wipes, but the fear of unavailability, which then triggers the mass purchases which in turn result in unavailability. The generalized fear of the early buyer leads to object specific panic in those later in the game who then overreact.

It is no coincidence, though, that when we are worried about infection, disease, failing bodily functions etc. we turn to things associated with cleanliness. Threat of illness heightens our aversion to the things that many feel are disgusting, and so we try to control that aspect of our lives.

Research by Paul Rozin at Penn and David Pizarro at Cornell University has provided important insights into the psychology of disgust. Disgust is a universal mechanism to prevent us from contagion. A sense of revulsion makes us shy away from biologically harmful things like vomit, feces, rotting meat and, to a certain extent, insects. (Details can be found here.) With growing populations on this planet, disgust reactions also lead us to shun people who violate the social conventions linked to disgust, or those we think, rightly or wrongly, are carriers of disease.

In fact, disgust however subtly instilled and not even consciously experienced, can change your value judgments. If I show you pictures of disease pathogens and then assess how you view foreign people, Africans or Asians, say, you rate them more negatively than those do who were previously shown non-disgusting stimuli. If I put you in a room that I prepped to smell like a horrible public toilet, you feel more animosity towards groups not your own, homosexuals in particular. Disgust, in other words, is encouraging or aggravating xenophobia and homophobia. (In some experiments people found a correlation between the degree of conservatism and the ease of being disgusted, leading to harsher judgements – the more conservative the greater the disgust, but that seems to work more for homophobia then everything else. I’ll check at some later point if it has been replicated.)

Disgust, once elicited in jurors hearing about vile details of a crime, makes it difficult for them to take into account mitigating factors important in the process of law, such as the intentions of the people involved in a case. Disgust also clouds a juror’s judgement more than feelings of anger.

And disgust, elicited by external forces (I have you watch a really yucky film clip) can make you sell totally unrelated stuff you own – a mug or pens I gifted you earlier – at knockdown prices. The Disgust Disposal Effect makes you want to get rid of stuff somehow associated with your current state, regardless of how little it is related to the source of the disgust.

Here is the 1987 landmark paper by Rozin and Fallon who first explored the emotion and how it might possibly be acquired. Looks like it is culturally transmitted, and young children have to be taught to experience disgust and how to behave towards its objects. Feces are central to the early education, and so it might be not surprising that we see something that is intrinsically associated with the control of feces to emerge as a focus when we are threatened with contamination. Just as we sell cheap when disgust was independently induced, we might buy high and wide when it feels like the purchase might counteract the disgust that is latently plaguing us.

Charmin, here we come!

And here is one of my favorite musicians of all time, with a nicely disgusting portrayal of a common condition…..
Here is more of the album, which I will play today all day.