Pandemic Times and Scarcity Mindset
Edition #11: Stock up! Stock up! And more!
We are in curious times. We are inundated with more information than we can consume or act upon. What does all this information do to us?
Let us take an example. A friend could tell you that the local grocery store is fast selling out and we need to secure our groceries. This bit of information spreads rapidly to our network and we are all queuing up, physically and online to stock up more than usual. And then, this happens.
Many of us feel groceries might be not be available as easily, that our families could potentially starve and thus they become more desirable. We might be developing what researchers Eldar Shafi and Senthil Mullainathan call a ‘scarcity mindset’. Interestingly, the context of this behavior-focused research was to understand choices of people that are poor, and is quite fascinating for anybody that works in the intersection of behavioral sciences and development.
In more gentler times, we individually still fall prey to such techniques online, often called dark patterns. While the paper itself is an absolute delight with amazing exhibits of a wide spectrum of sites (and how we get deceived more often than we know), here is how they broadly define such patterns.
“Dark patterns are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making decisions that, if fully informed and capable of selecting alternatives, they might not make.”
What intrigued me was that such dark patterns mimic the idea of scarcity among cash-rich.
They play on the basic impulse and vulnerabilities.
Here is a simple example. A booking site might use phrases like “high demand”, “somebody just booked this”, etc to create perceived scarcity. Essentially, make you believe that the offer is going to run out if you do not click right away although we all know such offers never go away!
In the scarcity mindset paradigm, researchers address some basic questions.
What happens to our minds—and our decisions—when we feel we have too little of something?
Why, in the face of scarcity, do people so often make seemingly irrational, even counter-productive decisions?
Psychologists have adequately documented the effect of scarcity on the human mind, i.e., when we have limited cognitive resources and bandwidth, akin to running multiple computer programs at the same time. We get into the tunnelling zone where our abilities and skills—attention, self-control, and long-term planning—often suffer.
I am by no means saying stocking up is good or bad nor am I suggesting that contingency plans are bad. I am just saying we are seeing interesting behaviors among people that are cash-rich and time-poor.
On a lighter note, here is something I would consider a smart nudge capturing this mindset and its effect of our behaviors on our society and communities.
In my next post, I will write about folks that cannot afford a hand sanitiser, cannot afford to stop working and what we could do to help our local communities.