Psychological factors and consumer behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic

A supermarket in northern Italy, March 2020. Shelves were stripped of pasta, rice, and hand sanitizer. Carts were piled high. Outside, there were police checkpoints and empty streets. Yet somewhere else in the same locked-down city, someone was sitting in their apartment doing almost no shopping at all, spending less than they ever did and barely able to motivate the click of a button. That split is what Di Crosta and colleagues decided to investigate. They looked into not just how the pandemic changed spending, but why it changed differently for different people — and in opposite directions depending on what they were buying. When the Italian national lockdown hit, overall self-reported weekly spending rose by about sixty-one percent in that first week compared to a typical pre-pandemic week. However, that average conceals a dramatic divergence. Spending on necessities, which include food, health products, and cleaning supplies, rose by nearly ninety-one percent. In contrast, spending on non-necessities, such as entertainment and clothing, rose by only thirty-six percent. The same external event and the same locked-down week produced two very different responses. Di Crosta and colleagues argue that each response had its own emotional driver, and they set out to identify them. The study used an online survey deployed through Qualtrics between April first and April twentieth, 2020, right at Italy's first contagion peak. Recruitment came through social media and word-of-mouth, resulting in a convenience sample. Participants needed to be eighteen or older and living in Italy. After excluding people over sixty-four and those who reported zero pre-pandemic spending in the relevant categories, the team arrived at three thousand eight hundred thirty-three participants, roughly sixty-nine percent women, with a mean age of thirty-four. To measure spending change, the survey asked participants to estimate what they spent weekly on necessities and non-necessities before the emergency and during the first lockdown week. Those figures became three change scores — general, necessities, and non-necessities — expressed as euro differences. Alongside those numbers, participants completed a purpose-built consumer behavior questionnaire that captured the psychological urge to buy, impulsiveness, perceived utility, and satisfaction from purchases. After conducting a principal component analysis, this yielded three scales: necessities, non-necessities, and self-justifications, the last of which measured the rationalizations people construct to permit or suppress spending. This included statements like "considering I'm saving money by not going out, I can afford this." The psychological toolkit was broad. Anxiety was measured with the Generalized Anxiety Disorder seven-item scale, or GAD-7. Depression was assessed through the Patient Health Questionnaire nine, or PHQ-9. Stress was captured with the fourteen-item Perceived Stress Scale. Personality was evaluated using the Italian Big Five Inventory ten-item measure, or BFI-10, with two items per trait. Fear specific to COVID-19 was assessed with an eight-item questionnaire covering perceived susceptibility and consequences. Lastly, perceived economic stability was evaluated with a three-item scale asking about finances before, during, and expected after the pandemic. Two hierarchical regression models then tested which of these variables predicted necessity versus non-necessity consumer behavior, entering predictors in six sequential steps: demographics, then personality, then anxiety, depression, and stress, followed by COVID fear, then economic stability, and finally self-justifications. Here is where the findings become striking. For necessities, the full model explained twenty-three percent of the variance. Anxiety and fear of COVID-19 were the key emotional drivers. Adding anxiety, depression, and stress in step three explained an additional seven percent of variance on its own. Then adding COVID-specific fear in step four contributed another six percent, while reducing anxiety's role somewhat — suggesting that fear and anxiety are related but distinct forces. In the final model, anxiety, fear of COVID-19, perceived economic stability, and self-justifications all emerged as significant predictors of necessity-directed buying. For non-necessities, the picture was meaningfully different. The final model also explained twenty-two percent of variance, but the emotional driver was depression, not anxiety or fear. Depression emerged as a positive predictor in step three and remained significant all the way to the final model, with a p-value of 0.002. The authors interpret this through a compensatory lens: people with higher depressive symptoms may be drawn to hedonic purchases as attempts to alleviate negative feelings. Fear and perceived economic stability each added small but significant contributions. Additionally, self-justifications were substantial — adding twelve percent of explained variance for non-necessities, compared to just four percent for necessities. The difference in self-justifications' impact across the two models was itself statistically significant. Think about what this means. Anxiety and fear activate survival-oriented behavior. When you're afraid, you stockpile. You buy the pasta, the hand sanitizer, and the extra boxes of whatever makes you feel safer. Depression works differently — it suppresses motivation but also apparently fuels a compensatory reach toward things that might make you feel better, even temporarily. Two emotional states, two spending trajectories, same pandemic. Personality added texture to this picture. In the necessities model, openness negatively predicted necessity buying — people higher in openness were less prone to stockpiling — and it remained significant even after emotional states were included. In the non-necessities model, conscientiousness was negatively associated with hedonic purchasing, while openness was positively associated. These effects were modest, each accounting for small amounts of variance, but they were consistent across model steps. Stable personality traits create a kind of baseline predisposition that acute emotional states then amplify or redirect. Perceived economic stability mattered too, though the effect was small — roughly one percent of additional variance in each model. The scale mean was sixty point five eight out of one hundred, meaning participants on average felt moderately economically secure. Even within that moderate range, people who felt financially steadier showed distinct consumer behavior. The self-justification finding deserves a moment of attention: with a mean score of thirty-eight point five eight out of one hundred on that scale, participants were using these rationalizations at moderate frequency. But for non-necessity purchases, those rationalizations were doing much of the predictive work. The internal story you tell yourself about whether you can afford something, whether you deserve it, and whether it makes sense given your circumstances turns out to be one of the stronger predictors of whether you actually buy it. The correlations between spending change scores and consumer behavior scales were significant but modest — around 0.22 and 0.23 for necessities and non-necessities respectively — which the authors acknowledge. These are self-reported estimates of spending, not transaction data, and the study captures a single, early moment in the pandemic. Behavior likely evolved as the situation changed. The convenience sample was predominantly female and relatively young, and the study's integrative approach, while a strength, may have masked more specific individual-level dynamics. Still, the core finding holds. Di Crosta and colleagues ran what amounts to a natural experiment: a single dramatic external shock applied simultaneously to thousands of people, with psychological variation already in place before it hit. That variation — who was anxious versus depressed, open versus conscientious, economically stable versus precarious — predicted which direction people moved. The lockdown didn't produce one response. It activated whatever was already primed. For anyone thinking about how crises reshape markets, this matters. Marketing strategies built around crisis behavior have typically treated consumers as a single stressed mass. This study indicates they're not. The person stockpiling essentials and the person ordering entertainment products online may both be responding to the pandemic, but they're responding to different internal states. Meeting consumers' actual needs in a crisis means knowing which emotional channel is driving the behavior. Fear calls for reassurance about availability and safety. Depression calls for something that addresses the loss of pleasure and normalcy. The same external shock produced two opposite behaviors, each with its own emotional logic. That's not just a finding about pandemics. It's a finding about how psychology and economic behavior are wired together under pressure — and the next time the world locks down, it will be worth remembering. This lecture was created by ennepō. Go to https://ennepo.ai to Discover, Create and Follow the latest research in your field. Read when you can. Listen when you want to.