SPI Two is the other member of SPI-B who could only speak to me honestly if I agreed to conceal their identity. They had grave concerns about the use of fear: ‘In March, the government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. The way we have used fear is dystopian. We have a totalitarian government in respect to propaganda. But all governments engage with propaganda. The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable. It’s been like a weird experiment. Ultimately, it backfired because people became too scared.’
We talked about propaganda during the Covid epidemic, which SPI Two felt had reached ‘sinister’ levels, and they shared their suspicions with me about ‘Clap for Carers’. ‘I never joined in with Clap for Carers. I was relieved when it was over. I would say it was “created”, invented, I don’t think it was grassroots,’ they confided. ‘We never discussed it in SPI-B, it wasn’t our policy or recommendation, I just think someone, somewhere dreamt it up. It was ready to go. Something about it struck me as artificial. I bristled at the rainbows in people’s windows. It felt more like a clap for Boris rather than a clap for the NHS. I think the government used it as a shield.’
I felt goosebumps. I had interviewed the ‘founder’ of Clap for Carers, Annemarie Plas, for an article I wanted to write, and had felt a strange hunch. Instead of pitching the story and portrait to a magazine as planned, I had felt stuck, unable to confirm my inklings one way or the other, so I’d just dropped it. SPI Two’s conjecture echoed my hunch, and it was not the first time someone close to government had shared suspicions that Clap for Carers was not the grassroots sensation it seemed.
It might be that Clap for Carers was invented by one of the covert propaganda units in the government. Or maybe it really did originate with Plas (she seemed genuine, I do believe her on this) but was turbo-charged to become a visible nationwide campaign with government help. It injected the early days of the lockdown with a feeling of hope and humanity. It encouraged the collectivism so beloved of the behavioural scientists. But something felt off, ‘artificial’, as SPI Two said. The government has form for manipulating emotion this way, which I explore in Chapter 7, ‘The tools of the trade’ and Chapter 8, ‘Controlled spontaneity and propaganda’.
We concluded our thought-provoking conversation. SPI Two told me they felt we had lost the balance between protecting people from a virus and protecting what makes us human. Again, this resonated deeply with my fears for the future when we first locked down. I asked how this could have happened. After a pause, SPI Two confessed: ‘I don’t want to contemplate it. We’ve allowed ourselves to be governed in this way.’ I pressed on – didn’t they want to know? They were part of the propaganda engine, so didn’t they want to know where we were being driven and why? ‘It’s in the name of the unit I am in – it’s behaviour. You could call psychology ‘mind control’. That’s what we do,’ they said. ‘Clearly we try and go about it in a positive way, but it has been used nefariously in the past. Psychology has been used for wicked ends. I don’t want to get too into this because it’s dystopian and it’s what wakes me up at 3am.’
AUSTIN, 75
I am 75, overweight, diabetic and my kidneys don’t work properly. That’s four strikes against me. My wife has asthma. I am the primary carer for my 98-year-old mother who lives with us and she is housebound. She doesn’t have any underlying health conditions other than she will be 99 in December. We have to keep anointing her skin or it would get dry and cracked.
I would not find it easy to live with myself if she caught coronavirus. She’ll die at some point in the next two weeks to 10 years, but I don’t want to be the agent of that.
Between my wife and myself we do everything for her. I do all the cooking. We don’t have any carers going into the house because we don’t want to import anything. She can go to the loo on her own but she is almost double incontinent.
Our washing machine has broken down. I don’t want a new one delivered because that would mean a person coming into the house and a washing machine coming in which might have coronavirus on its shiny surfaces. We’ve been hand washing for longer than I would like. I have become very good at wringing out towels and sheets in the garden.
It’s getting a bit more oppressive now we’re seven months in, but I can continue living the lifestyle that I have set up for myself almost indefinitely. We get food delivered, we get stuff in the post, I read a lot, I can do the gardening and put the bins out.
What is hard for me is not seeing people and getting out, not having hugs. I have had lots of Zooms. My daughter and one of my sons come by every now and then and wave outside the living room window. It’s better than nothing, but it’s hard.
I feel a slump a couple of days a week, but then it gets better again. We have foxes in our garden and it’s glorious to watch them. Little things like that are moments of joy and keep you going.
I haven’t had fear and angst, but I do have high levels of concern. My fears centre around the incompetence of our government and the disinformation. They claim to be led by science, but their lack of strategy has made me concerned. I am fed up with lies and misinformation. The writing was on the wall when Cummings was not in trouble for travelling up north. I cannot believe that this government are as incompetent as they appear. I have to believe that the misinformation is deliberate. It doesn’t make sense otherwise.
7. THE TOOLS OF THE TRADE
‘I’m stunned by the weaponisation of behavioural psychology over the last five years.’
Anonymous scientific advisor deeply embedded in Whitehall
Covid-19 is not the first time the UK government has frightened us for public health reasons. A standout example is the ‘Don’t die of ignorance’ campaign about AIDS in 1986. It was a powerfully chilling television and leaflet campaign, and still haunts our memories.
According to the campaign, AIDS had an ‘explosive infection rate’ and it was predicted that millions of Britons would become infected.1 Sound familiar? In another parallel with Covid-19, the media coverage was a cacophony of doom. Fear and death sell.
The Chief Medical Officer, Donald Acheson, and the Health Minister, Norman Fowler, pushed to create a hard-hitting campaign that would convey that everyone was at risk, rather than particular groups being more at risk. Similarly, our government has done very little to explain that risk from Covid-19 varies according to age and co-morbidity, and as we know there was an intention to increase our ‘perceived level of threat’.
In the early days of the AIDS campaign, the message was given that anal sex carried the highest risk and should be avoided altogether, which was an unrealistic and overly-prescriptive expectation. That message was soon replaced by the advice to use condoms for safe sex. Advice which doesn’t take human nature into account is harder to follow.
The focus on death aimed to frighten people into changing their behaviour. People still remember the ad and the feelings it conjured. I know I do. As a 13-year-old the haunting campaign imprinted on me that ‘something’ was very, very dangerous. Three years earlier, I’d had to pretend to the cool kids in primary school that I understood the lyrics to the Frankie Goes to Hollywood song, Relax Don’t Do It. I didn’t quite understand this campaign either, but it was frightening.
Rather like the messaging on Covid, the AIDS advertising elevated fear but did not provide balance. People with HIV had to live with the disease, and still do, and the campaign did nothing to calm their fears. I imagine it must have been frightening to see the tombstone and loaded messages for those who were living with a positive diagnosis. Perhaps it drove the fear and social ostracism which people with HIV experienced. The British TV series It’s a Sin about the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s has provoked people to write about the terrible fear that they felt at the time. One nurse recalled the ‘fear, the isolation on the wards, gowns, masks and gloves to enter
a patient’s room.’2
I spoke to doctor and public health expert Jackie Cassell about her recollections of the AIDS campaign. ‘The fear was controversial at the time,’ she told me ‘People in public health generally thought they were terrible adverts. But they seemed to have an impact and it changed what politicians would talk about, such as condoms and sex. There was a sense that it was a success, but we didn’t like the fear.’
Similarly, how many people have been terrified by the thought of Covid, even though for the vast majority it is not very dangerous? As a reminder, Patrick Vallance told the nation on 13 March 2020 that ‘the vast majority of people get a mild illness’,3 but just 10 days later, Boris Johnson warned of ‘the devastating impact of this invisible killer’.4 The messaging mutated faster than the virus or the scientific evidence.
Research showed that the AIDS campaign changed people’s behaviour and the government considered it a success. However, some critics felt that it created panic rather than a proper understanding of risk and that it was actually grassroots organisations, such as the Terence Higgins Trust, which did more to slow the spread of infection among the impacted groups of people. As Cassell told me, ‘What really made a difference to the people at highest risk was the gay community action and activism. The government’s big success was needle exchanges for drug users.’
Is it ethical to use fear if it is in our best interests? For the sake of our health? Some would say so. As the Behavioural Insights Team report, MINDSPACE Influencing behaviour through public policy,5 says, ‘If we can establish that the behaviours do reduce wellbeing, the case for nudges is compelling’, while also acknowledging that it is ‘controversial’. In other words, the ends justify the means, even if the public wouldn’t like it if they understood they were being hoodwinked. And does the government claim credit for its own campaigns rather than honestly attributing credit where it is due? Normal Fowler said of the AIDS campaign: ‘There was no time to think about whether it might offend one or two people. And history shows we were right – people took care and HIV cases went down.’6 What about the Terence Higgins Trust or other grassroots organisations? Might a different sort of campaign also have encouraged people to take care without scaring everyone witless?
Since the AIDS campaign, the use of behavioural psychology has become more formalised and deeply embedded in government. The Behavioural Insights team has a couple of handy acronyms to detail its methods: EAST (Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely) and MINDSPACE. I’m going to zoom in on the effects described in the MINDSPACE7 document, as it offers more detail.
MESSENGER
We are heavily influenced by who communicates information, including their perceived authority, our relationship to them and how we feel about them. If the messengers are perceived as possessing high levels of authority, or to be worthy of admiration, people will be more likely to believe them and follow their advice and directives. Think of NHS frontline medics relaying the importance of staying home to protect the NHS.
INCENTIVES
Our responses to incentives are shaped by predictable mental shortcuts such as strongly avoiding losses. Incentives are not just financial (although they can be, such as fines) but can be the costs and benefits of behaving certain ways.
NORMS
We are strongly influenced by what others do. The power of norms comes from the social penalties for non-compliance, or the social benefit that comes from conforming. Being ‘deviant’ can feel highly uncomfortable. Would you rather be a Covid hero or a ‘covidiot’? The government has repeatedly used normative pressure throughout the coronavirus crisis to gain the public’s compliance with their escalating restrictions.
DEFAULTS
We ‘go with the flow’ of pre-set options – we stand on the dot in the supermarket.
SALIENCE
Our attention is drawn to what is novel and what seems relevant to us, from flashing roadside signs reminding us not to travel (too late!) to relatable data and statistics, such as risk of deaths.
PRIMING
Our acts are often influenced by sub-conscious cues such as sights (for example, face coverings), words (‘Hands, Face, Space’) and sensations (again, wearing face coverings), causing us to be behave differently. This is one of the least understood of the MINDSPACE effects, and ‘has led to considerable controversy, not least to the slightly sinister idea that advertisers – or even governments – might be able to manipulate us into buying or do things that we didn’t really want to buy or do.’8 That indictment is from the behavioural scientists themselves!
AFFECT
Our emotional associations can powerfully shape our actions. Our emotional state significantly influences our mental processes and behaviour. This ‘mood congruence effect’ will result in a person selectively noticing and remembering information that is consistent with an existing mood. When happy, you are more likely to remember past successes, to notice the positives and develop optimistic beliefs about the future. When sad, you are more likely to remember failure and loss, notice the negatives and subsequently harbour pessimistic beliefs about yourself and the world. When fearful, your memory will be skewed in favour of past scary events, your attention will selectively focus on potential dangers in your current environment, and your mind will be swamped with thoughts about future threats and potential disasters. This recalibration of our minds towards the fear mode has been exploited by the government and the behavioural psychologists to ensure mass compliance with the emergency laws and rules.
COMMITMENTS
We seek to be consistent with our public promises, and reciprocate acts, agreeing to commit to a goal or commitment if someone else does.
EGO
We act in ways that make us feel better about ourselves. We all strive to maintain a positive view of ourselves and, in so doing, exhibit cognitive biases in the way we make sense of the world. For example, to preserve a virtuous self-image, each of us routinely displays what psychologists refer to as a ‘fundamental attribution error’, whereby we take the credit for good outcomes while blaming others for bad ones. This inherent drive to protect our ego, to act and think in ways that make us feel better about ourselves, has been comprehensively exploited to make us conform with coronavirus restrictions.
These effects can be seen in many of the campaigns and strategies employed by the UK government this year. I interviewed psychologist Gary Sidley, who has also authored an excellent article about MINDSPACE9, and behavioural scientists Patrick Fagan and Richard Shotton, and Dr Ashley Frawley, senior lecturer in sociology and social policy at Swansea University in Wales, to discuss the government messaging.
A central tenet of this book is that the use of fear to create compliance is ethically dubious and, at the very least, warrants public debate. In a short window of time, behavioural psychology has become core to how the UK government does business and these days it’s the business of fear. The psychologists ‘are operating in ethically murky waters in implementing their nudges, without our consent, to promote mass acceptance of infringements on our basic human freedoms,’ said Gary Sidley. The ethics of nudging deserve their own consultation but are even more worthy of scrutiny ‘when one considers the ongoing carnage associated with the elevated fear levels’. (See Chapter 16, ‘Terrifying impacts’, for more on the ‘carnage’.) Frawley told me that she believes the deliberate manipulation of our emotions ‘affects our deepest existential questions. The ability to manage our emotional lives is not entrusted to us.’
Behavioural scientist Richard Shotton, author of The Choice Factory, was more sanguine about nudging. I asked him to talk me through some of the highs and lows of the behavioural science approach during the Covid epidemic. Overall, he argued that behavioural insights are an effective tool to shape communications; as you have to choose how to communicate, you may as well do it in a way that will engineer the desired results.
Shotton offered the example of ‘social proof’ which is the ‘norms’ effect. He told me that peop
le can be seen as ‘slightly silly’ for following these biases, but if they were misleading or useless we wouldn’t follow them. In essence, ‘social proof is a remarkably useful tactic’, and has helped humans stay alive in our evolutionary past. These days, for example, you can’t weigh up every single purchase in the supermarket. It would take a phenomenal amount of time and be an illogical approach. Social proof, simply doing what most other people do, is a faster way of making choices. As Edward Bernays put it, ‘It would be ideal if all of us could make up our minds independently by evaluating all pertinent facts objectively. That, however, is not possible.’10
Likewise, Patrick Fagan, author of Hooked and former lead psychologist at Cambridge Analytica, told me, ‘Most people can’t deal with the facts. We have limited brain power, we can only think about so much. So rational appeals to the general public are less effective than nudging. Talking in concrete emotional terms is more effective.’ Hmm – so, did he think the government’s nudging had been ethical? ‘I’m talking about my own profession here, but behavioural science has become egregious. At the moment it is about fundamentally changing how people live and taking away their freedoms. The nudge unit have appointed themselves as the Ministry of Choice and have decided to do the deciding for everyone else. In David Halpern’s book, Inside the Nudge Unit, when he considers the ethics of this he says you don’t ask children if they want to learn to read and write, you just teach them to do it. I think it shows he thinks of the population as being like children.’
I asked Fagan if he thought the government were relying on fear when other forms of persuasion were possible. He agreed that ‘there are many ways to nudge. You can appeal to duty. You can use reciprocity – the older generation did this for you, you can do something in return. And fear has been overplayed. But emotion is the steam in the engine that drives behaviour and fear is the oldest and strongest emotion.’
A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic Page 11
