User:ILuluMaeI/sandbox

Scarcity in social psychology is the principle that an item or opportunity becomes more desirable as its availability decreases. There are several reasons for this phenomenon including social proof, commitment and consistency, and reactance. Social proof affects scarcity because the fact that a commodity is so rare implies that it's due to other people getting it and if so many believes it is worth the effort than it must be. Commitment and consistency comes into play when you choose something only to decide that it is not readily available you want it that much more so you will appear consistent. That also ties in with reactance because the thought of losing something is much more troubling than simply gaining it.

It is a common belief that rare items are more valuable and for good reason, most often rare items are more valuable. This is why many people collect items such as baseball cards or limited edition dolls, the value of these items increase with time because they become less common. Recent research has proved that this heuristic is so prevalent that people reverse it by assigning a greater value to items they perceive as uncommon.

Experiments by Ditto and Jemmot show that the scarcity principle applies when assigning both positive and negative attributes. In these studies subjects were told of a medical condition described as either beneficial or detrimental to one's health and that said illness was either common or rare. Regardless of whether the condition was helpful or harmful its effect was considered more extreme if it was rare. Other research demonstrates that the actual value of an object does not matter; people are more willing to accept a scarce object of lesser value than a higher valued abundant object.

Scarcity and reactance are complementary in that when commodities are taken away from people it becomes scarcer and they have a strong negative reaction to the loss that makes them want the commodity that much more. An experiment that gave one group of subjects a small amount of cookies and another a large amount but then had a person working with the researcher take a couple of the cookies found that the subjects who started out with a lot of cookies but had a small amount taken away enjoyed their cookies more than the subjects that had a scarce supply of cookies to begin with. An experiment in which recorded messages were played for subjects demonstrated the effect of censorship on scarcity. In this study the subjects were divided into two groups, one was told they would hear all the recordings used in the study and the second that they would hear only some of the recordings. Later both groups were told that one recording wouldn't be used because it had been censored. The desire of both groups to hear that specific recording increased with the news that it was censored but this increase was more profound in the group who had been told they would hear all recordings. These two experiments show that the rule of scarcity is amplified when the scarcity is actively caused by an outside factor such as censorship.

Two ways organizations employ the scarcity principle to increase sales is through the limited number and limited time only tactics. By telling consumers that their product is in limited supply or will only be available for a certain amount of time the product will be seen as special and the consumers will be motivated to buy it quickly.