Why telling people 'don't panic' never stops panic buying - and what does

Why do people strip supermarket shelves bare of toilet paper when a crisis hits, even when supply chains are stable and officials are pleading for calm?

The intuitive answer - that panic buyers are anxious, selfish, or irrational - turns out to be mostly wrong. Research from the University of the Sunshine Coast, drawing on behavioral data collected during Australia's COVID-19 lockdowns, shows that panic buying is driven not by personality traits or demographics but by two specific beliefs: that there's a real risk in not stockpiling, and that other people are already doing it.

More importantly, a randomized controlled trial found that brief, targeted messages addressing those beliefs significantly reduced people's willingness to panic buy. The behavior, it turns out, is not just predictable. It may be preventable.

What actually drives the rush to stockpile

Karina Rune, a researcher in health and behavioral sciences at UniSC, has studied panic buying as a collective behavior problem rather than an individual failing. Her collaborative research, published in Behavioral Sciences, examined what psychological factors predicted stockpiling behavior during COVID-19 lockdowns and then tested whether targeted interventions could change those factors.

The research identified two primary drivers. The first is risk perception - the belief that not buying extra carries a genuine personal cost. When people think they'll miss out on essentials if they don't act now, stockpiling becomes a rational response to perceived scarcity, regardless of whether that scarcity actually exists. The second driver is perceived social norms - the belief that stockpiling is what everyone else is doing, or what smart, responsible people do. If panic buying appears normal and socially endorsed, the threshold for joining in drops sharply.

These two factors create a feedback loop that is hard to break once it starts. Images of empty shelves (whether on social media, news broadcasts, or experienced firsthand) confirm the belief that scarcity is real and that others are stockpiling. Each person who buys extra accelerates the visible depletion. The behavior creates the very shortage it was trying to prevent.

Rune put it plainly: people were not panic buying because they were anxious personalities or poor planners. They were responding to the belief that stockpiling was sensible, necessary, or something everyone else was doing.

What doesn't predict panic buying

Just as striking as what drives panic buying is what doesn't. The research found that demographic factors - age, gender, income, and household size - were not reliable predictors of stockpiling behavior. Wealthy people panic-bought. Low-income people panic-bought. Young adults and retirees both cleared shelves. The behavior cut across every demographic category the researchers measured.

Personality traits were similarly uninformative. Intolerance of uncertainty, general anxiety, and even prior hoarding behavior did not meaningfully predict who would rush to stockpile during a lockdown. This finding undercuts the common narrative that panic buyers are somehow psychologically different from everyone else - more fearful, more selfish, less rational. They're not. They're responding to situational cues that would push most people toward the same behavior under the same conditions.

This reframing matters for intervention design. If panic buying were driven by stable personality traits, there would be little point in trying to change it through public messaging. You can't alter someone's personality with a poster in a supermarket. But if the behavior is driven by beliefs about risk and social norms - beliefs that are context-dependent and potentially malleable - then the right message at the right time might actually make a difference.

Testing the intervention: reframing risk and norms

Rune's team put this logic to the test. In a randomized controlled trial, Australian shoppers were shown brief, evidence-based messages designed to challenge the beliefs that drive panic buying. The messages took three approaches:

• Risk reframing: explaining that supply chains were stable and that panic buying itself - not the crisis - was the primary cause of shortages
• Social norm correction: informing participants that most people were buying normally, countering the impression that everyone was stockpiling
• Outcome reframing: explaining how panic buying harms communities, including vulnerable people who can't compete for scarce goods

The results were encouraging. Participants who received the intervention messages showed a significant reduction in both their willingness and their stated intention to panic buy, particularly for hygiene products and nonperishable food - the categories that dominated COVID-era stockpiling. The effect sizes were meaningful enough to suggest that scalable messaging campaigns could reduce panic buying at the population level.

The key insight is that the intervention didn't try to calm people down or reassure them that everything was fine. Telling people "don't panic" is, as Rune noted, ineffective. It doesn't address the underlying belief structure. What works is directly challenging the beliefs that make panic buying feel rational: showing that shortages are caused by the behavior itself, not by genuine supply problems; demonstrating that most people are not stockpiling; and making visible the harm that hoarding inflicts on others.

Timing matters more than tone

One of the study's practical implications is that messaging needs to happen before shelves start to empty. Once people see gaps in the toilet paper aisle, the visual evidence of scarcity overwhelms any message about supply chain stability. The feedback loop activates, and communication becomes damage control rather than prevention.

This has implications for how governments and retailers communicate during emerging crises - whether pandemics, natural disasters, fuel shortages, or other disruptions. The standard approach of waiting until panic buying is already underway and then asking people to stop is, the evidence suggests, backwards. Preemptive messaging that addresses risk perception and social norms before the first images of empty shelves circulate would likely be more effective.

Australia, which faces ongoing exposure to cyclones, bushfires, flooding, and supply chain disruptions from climate-driven events, has particular reason to develop these communication strategies. Similar dynamics have played out during fuel shortages in the United Kingdom and hurricane preparations in the United States, suggesting the findings have broad applicability beyond the COVID context.

Limitations of a messaging-only approach

The study tested messaging in a controlled experimental setting, which means the results don't fully account for the chaos of a real crisis. During an actual lockdown, people are exposed to competing information from social media, news coverage, friends, and family - information streams that may overpower any government or retailer messaging. Whether the intervention's effects hold up in a live crisis, as opposed to a survey scenario, remains untested.

The study also measured intentions, not behavior. Participants reported what they would do, not what they actually did. The gap between stated intentions and real-world actions is well-documented in behavioral research. Some people who said they wouldn't panic buy might still do so when faced with an actual crisis. Others might act on the messaging more strongly than they predicted.

And messaging alone doesn't address structural factors that contribute to panic buying. If a supermarket's just-in-time inventory system means shelves hold only two days of stock for a given product, even modest increases in purchasing can create visible gaps that trigger the scarcity feedback loop. Supply chain resilience, purchase limits, and inventory management are physical interventions that may need to complement communication strategies.

The randomized trial focused on Australian shoppers during a period shaped by COVID experiences. Whether the same belief structures drive panic buying in different cultural contexts - where attitudes toward individual responsibility, collective action, and government authority differ - is an open question that cross-cultural research would need to address.

Preventable, not inevitable

The bottom line from the Australian research is that panic buying is a collective behavior problem with identifiable psychological drivers and, potentially, scalable solutions. It's not about personality. It's not about demographics. It's about what people believe regarding risk and what they think everyone else is doing.

Those beliefs can be shaped. Not by telling people to stay calm - that's never worked and shows no sign of starting. But by providing clear, specific, evidence-based information that addresses the actual cognitive drivers of the behavior. COVID showed that panic buying is predictable. The next step is applying that knowledge before the next crisis empties the shelves.