As Laura Dodsworth writes in a recent article, the claim by members of SPI-B (the U.K. Government’s Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours) that they opposed the use of fear to control public behaviour is demonstrably false. It’s a minuted fact that they advised directly threatening a sizeable proportion of the U.K. population:
It’s disturbing enough that a group of senior academics see fit to deny historical fact in a major medical journal, yet Dodsworth’s other anxiety is even more troubling:
My second significant concern was the astonishing idea that the authors could “leave aside the ethical and political dimensions of this argument”. How can psychologists leave aside the ethical dimensions of using fear, whether for an article or advising Government and drafting the plans in the first place?
The psychologists base their claim that they wouldn’t have recommended threat (even though they did) on a selective reading of the literature:
The scientific literature tells a very different story. It shows that frightening people is generally an ineffective way of persuading them to engage in health protective behaviours.
However, basic facts, most scientific research in the field, and their previously published writings undermine their denial.
Ethics-free behavioural science is impossible if it is used to change behaviour
Professors Reicher, Drury, Michie and West were all members of SPI-B. There is no record of any of them objecting to the use of “hard-hitting emotional… threat”. Yet this is such an extreme recommendation that it’s surely reasonable to conclude that they would have opposed it had they disagreed with it.
The idea that you can separate behavioural science from politics and ethics shows lack of knowledge of all three disciplines. It is possible to use scientific methods to try to understand human behaviour without making value judgements, but it’s impossible to endorse techniques to change human behaviour without being slap bang in the middle of the ethical arena.
And this, undeniably, is where they sit. They say, for example:
Information is important and must provide clear and specific guidance for exactly what behaviour individuals should adopt to implement social distancing. …
‘Protect each other’ messages should stress how desired behaviours benefit the group and protect its most vulnerable members, including those we love. …
Messages should give clear, specific and calm advice, helping households to plan together how to commit to social distancing. …
Messages should be communicated via professionally designed and appealing mass and social media campaigns.
These are imperative statements. They cannot possibly be ethically neutral. They are central to the authors’ entire position – lay them to one side and there is nothing left.
It’s definitive of ethics that any intervention in the life of other sentient beings requires justification. It’s a fundamental component of ethical deliberation. All ethical codes, principles and standards are premised on it.
At least some SPI-B members appear unaware of this elementary fact. Instead, they regard the application of methods of persuasion as an unproblematic technical exercise – a pragmatic approach to behaviour change which has no need to justify its goals, need take no account of the diversity of human values, can ignore established principles of applied ethics and – incomprehensibly – is able to overlook the complexities of human psychology. Like Dodsworth, I find this extraordinary.
A similar document by other behavioural scientists – MINDSPACE – published by the Cabinet Office, shows equally questionable assumptions. A wordsearch of the MINDSPACE document for ‘ethical’, ‘ethics’ and related terms returns no results. Reicher et al.’s work is equally free from mention of ethics. MINDSPACE does raise what it calls the “moral hazard problem”:
If we think the state is making decisions for us, we may absolve ourselves of the responsibility to take charge of our own behaviour.
Which is a bit rich since behavioural scientists of this ilk don’t trust us to take charge of our behaviour in any case. The entire point of MINDSPACE – indeed the entire point of applying behavioural science at all – is to make people think and act in ways we would not otherwise do.
This is manifestly not an impartial endeavour, yet Susan Michie, one of the SPI-B group, explicitly believes it is. According to her, it is sufficient merely to provide the conditions most likely to achieve a “specified behavioural target“. She sees her job as nothing more than creating “reliable classifications” to help identify which “modes of delivery” (MoDs) will work best in which circumstances:
By providing greater clarity about how an intervention and its components are delivered, researchers can add to knowledge as to how MoDs influence intervention effectiveness, both directly and in interaction with other intervention-related entities. This will inform the selection of appropriate MoDs for interventions.
Value judgements, ethical deliberation and goal justification are simply not in the picture. All that matters is whether a strategy will change whatever behaviour happens to be in the scientists’ sights.
It’s difficult to understand how anyone can maintain this point of view. It contradicts a fundamental of Western thought, namely that ethically aware human beings are bound to consider the moral calibre of both the goals and the methods of their actions. It’s almost universally accepted that the first question that should be asked by anyone with moral conscience is “should this be done?”, not “does this work?” It is no small matter that a group of influential behavioural scientists do not appear to recognise this.
Other behavioural scientists are more perceptive, suggesting moral limits to behavioural science interventions. Dr. Helena Rubinstein writes:
In the past, there has been public unease about the use of the psychological sciences in the commercial sector. This produced a backlash against apparently subversive techniques, but also resulted in the setting up of a code of practice supported by the industry.
The same may be needed with respect to the use of behavioural science. As a starting point, we suggest the following guidelines:
1.Behavioural interventions built on untruths are unacceptable.
2.Nudges that make it difficult for people to choose otherwise are unethical: people must have the freedom to choose differently.
3.Behavioural interventions should be scrutinised for unintended, as well as intended, consequences.
4.Consent should not be hidden: interventions should be transparent wherever possible.
5.Practitioners should be comfortable to defend their approach, methods and motives in public.
Unlike Michie and her colleagues, Rubinstein understands that there is a profound ethical difference between exercising methods to change a person’s behaviour if he or she requests help, and exercising methods to change a person’s behaviour without being asked.
The scientific literature shows that using fear to change behaviours can be an effective strategy
Reicher et al. cite a single paper in support of their claim that frightening people is an ineffective means of persuasion. Unfortunately, they do not seem to have read it fully. Despite what they suppose it says, it affirms that threatening people does work so long as you enable them to act to mitigate the perceived threat:
Current evidence shows that information about the severity of possible negative consequences from risk behaviour may prompt defensive responses. These counterproductive responses may be avoided by providing instruction on how to successfully implement the recommended actions as well as convincing people that they are personally susceptible to the threat.
This is precisely the approach which underpins the fear tactics the group advised and now want to deny – threats do work given certain conditions; therefore, threatening people can be considered a legitimate behavioural science strategy. This conclusion is further supported by a massive meta-analysis which for some reason they overlooked:
Fear-based appeals appear to be effective at influencing attitudes and behaviors, especially among women, according to a comprehensive review of over 50 years of research on the topic, published by the American Psychological Association.
These appeals are effective at changing attitudes, intentions and behaviours. There are very few circumstances under which they are not effective and there are no identifiable circumstances under which they backfire and lead to undesirable outcomes,” said Dolores Albarracin, PhD, Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The authors’ argument contradicts their other work
Reicher et al. maintain that it’s advisable to: “Avoid authoritarian messages: Messages based on coercion and authority can in some circumstances achieve large changes in the short term but can be hard to sustain in the longer term.”
Yet this is the polar opposite of what they say in other published work. Susan Michie, for example, has extensively promoted a “behaviour change wheel” (BCW) which she describes as “a new method for characterising and designing behaviour change interventions”. At the hub of her wheel there are “three essential conditions: capability, opportunity, and motivation”, “nine intervention functions aimed at addressing deficits in one or more of these conditions” and “seven categories of policy that could enable those interventions to occur”.
These are summarised graphically:
The idea is that any behaviour requires capability, opportunity and motivation. If you want to change a behaviour you can use a range of interventions (in red) and broader policy (in grey). Taken in isolation this makes some sense, but when the BCW is examined in conjunction with the groups’ advice on “harnessing behavioural science in public health campaigns” it becomes absurd.
Michie and her collaborators urge caution about implementing restrictive measures for epidemics. Yet this, unambiguously, is what her BCW advocates: “restrictions”, “persuasion”, “modelling”, “regulation”, “training” and “coercion” are all essential tools of this type of applied behavioural science.
In previous publications they consider coercion a useful manipulative tool, in their denials they don’t: “We recommend coercion. We don’t recommend coercion.”
This is classic double-think – the acceptance of contrary opinions or beliefs at the same time. In case there’s any doubt, coercion (which they favour) involves threatening people (which they claim they didn’t want to do):
Coercion involves compelling a party to act in an involuntary manner by the use of threats, including threats to use force against that party. It involves a set of forceful actions which violate the free will of an individual in order to induce a desired response.
(Coercion is the) use of force or intimidation to obtain compliance.
(Coercion) occurs if one party intentionally and successfully influences another by presenting a credible threat of unwanted and avoidable harm so severe that the person is unable to resist acting to avoid it.
Apparently they have left memory, logic and reason to one side as well as ethics.
Their view of ‘empowerment’ is twisted
The scientists say they really wanted to ‘empower’ us:
This emphasis on empowerment is even clearer when one looks across the corpus of SPI-B reports. It reflected a conception of the public as an asset rather than an impediment in the pandemic. The advice was to engage with the public and focus on supporting them in doing the right thing rather than assume they need frightening and coercing in order to stop them from doing the wrong thing. This is particularly clear in another report of April 3rd 2020 on “harnessing behavioural science to maintain social distancing” (subsequently published as a journal article). Among the key principles set out in the paper were the need to avoid authoritarian messaging based on coercion, an emphasis on enabling behaviour rather than the use of punishment or castigation, and the need to engage with communities in order to co-design interventions with them as opposed to imposing interventions upon them.
SPI-B did indeed recommend giving people control. But not because they consider personal autonomy an intrinsic human good, rather because limited freedom of choice is thought to increase compliance with ‘doing the right thing’. In normal parlance, if you empower individuals, you enable them to choose for themselves. In SPI-B speak ‘empowerment’ means ‘enabling them to do the right thing’ as defined by ‘experts’ who self-evidently know best.
It’s very hard to see how fostering population-wide guilt, nationwide mass media propaganda campaigns and targeting potentially recalcitrant groups of people is empowering according to any established use of the term.
They believe the only thing that matters is that a behavioural intervention works
Every moderately educated school student understands that ‘the right thing to do’ is usually open to interpretation. In a diverse society ‘doing the right thing’ can have a different meaning for different people. ‘Doing the right thing’ can mean protesting authoritarian restrictions on free movement and assembly, or writing articles critical of Government policy, for example. How can university professors fail to understand that in social context ‘doing the right thing’ is a contested concept?
Michie laments that the U.K. Government failed to use key elements of the BCW (even though it did use them):
Just by identifying all the potential intervention functions and policy categories this framework could prevent policy makers and intervention designers from neglecting important options. For example, it has been used in U.K. parliamentary circles to demonstrate to Members of Parliament that the current U.K. Government is ignoring important evidence-based interventions to change behaviour in relation to public health. By focusing on environmental restructuring, some incentivisation and forms of subtle persuasion to influence behaviour, as advocated by the popular book ‘Nudge’, the U.K. Government eschews the use of coercion, persuasion or the other BCW intervention functions that one might use. (My italics)
In other words, government is too flaky. It should use whatever might work from the BCW smorgasbord without worrying about ethical niceties:
The BCW… forms the basis for a systematic analysis of how to make the selection of interventions and policies. Having selected the intervention function or functions most likely to be effective in changing a particular target behaviour, these can then be linked to more fine-grained specific behaviour change techniques (BCTs). Any one intervention function is likely to comprise many individual BCTs, and the same BCT may serve different intervention functions… Thus, the BCW approach is based on a comprehensive causal analysis of behaviour and starts with the question: “What conditions internal to individuals and in their social and physical environment need to be in place for a specified behavioural target to be achieved?” (my italics)
As Laura Dodsworth notes, Michie and her colleagues do not exclude any interventions – if an intervention will change a behaviour they can see no reason not to implement it. If you’re oblivious to ethical considerations then what is to stop you advising the use of fear?
No-one asked them to manipulate our behaviours
The collaborators are proud of their controlling tactics:
As a group of behavioural and social scientists who have shared their advice with Government through the U.K.’s Government Office for Science, we have collaborated to develop a series of principles to inform interventions to promote whole population adherence to social distancing measures.
Their paternalistic assumptions are overwhelming. Perhaps the biggest is that the ‘whole population’ needed coercing to ‘adhere’ to rules we had no part in making, were not consulted about, and for which there was no clear evidence:
Airborne transmission of COVID-19 is highly random and suggests that the two-meter (6 foot) rule was a number chosen from a risk ‘continuum’, rather than any concrete measurement of safety.
Early social distancing is either doing nothing or making things worse. This is likely because the virus spreads mainly in hospitals, care homes and private homes rather than in the community, so social distancing of the wider population beyond a basic minimum (washing hands, self-isolating when ill, not getting too close, and so on) has little impact. The countries with the highest death tolls are often those which fail to protect their care homes adequately, with up to 82% of COVID-19 deaths occurring among care home residents.
SPI-B uncritically accepted the need for social distancing, made no recommendation to educate the public about the actual data, and had no interest in enabling people either to dissent or act on any alternative view. Informed consent was simply not a consideration.
What does this ‘behavioural science’ amount to?
Having read other publications by the main authors, and considered similar behavioural science writings, I conclude that the only possible answer is ‘not very much’. As far as I can see, at least in the hands of Michie and her colleagues, the primary function of applied behavioural science is to manipulate people into acting in ways we would not naturally. It assumes a crude distinction between ‘doing the right thing’ and ‘doing the wrong thing’ the manipulators think requires neither explanation nor justification. It also assumes that those of us not equipped or not willing to do ‘the right thing’ need to be persuaded to do it, using crude psychological devices. The use of threat, coupled with Orwellian ‘empowerment to comply’, is one such device.
I cannot find any more substance than this. If I’m mistaken, I’m open to a mutually informative discussion in public.
Finally, on a personal note, having published a frustrated analysis of Covid evidence and policy in September 2020, both mystified by and critical of the woeful thinking and insidious coercion we were all subject to then, my advice to the behavioural scientists and the many others addicted to control remains the same four years on. The public is neither an ‘asset’ nor an ‘impediment’. We are knowledgeable human beings able to make our own choices given the chance. We need unfiltered information, unbiased support to process it if necessary, and practical democratic mechanisms that allow us to respond – free from coercion – to policies that affect our daily lives.
David Seedhouse was the first lecturer in medical ethics to be appointed to a U.K. university in the 1980s. He is currently Honorary Professor of Deliberative Practice at Aston University.
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“a Kill the Bill march in London drew five thousand mostly young protestors “
If this numbers assessment is true, then what I’ve previously said about the BLM sort of fakery holds good.
It really is a side-issue that is best ignored rather than something acting as an alternative wet knicker thing.
Just take the piss out of all those submissive mask-wearing Covidians pretending to be opposed to police over-reach and discrimination.
I suppose the obvious thing to also say is that this looks like a rather exclusive protest by ‘white privilege’.
There will be an awful lot of psychological counselling and de-programming required, once the scale of the lie and the levels of state-endorsed propaganda becomes apparent and undeniable, to the covid faithful.
The labour movement has thrown its support behind the various alphabet protests but resolutely refuses to acknowledge the significance of the anti-lockdown movement. It says everything about the present condition of the left – whilst it preoccupies itself with single-issue and identity-driven political positions, the broad masses are organising on a scale that the efforts of BLM, KTB, RTS and XR can’t compete with, and they are getting on just fine without the help of the trade unions, the left parties and groups and the Labour party. The Left has walked into a trap over the lockdown crisis. As a strategic error, it rivals the almost unanimous support the socialist parties of Europe gave for the war in 1914.
The left hasn’t walked into a trap, the left is doing just fine which is out on the streets and enduring persecution where it’s always been. All those who ‘identify’ as left but aren’t are the ones who’ve ‘fallen’ for exactly the sort of politics that suits them: fascism.
This ‘Left’ is unfortunately marginalised. There are also plenty of Socialists who are opposed to Woke i.d. politics, but they are marginalised too.
Of course. Unfortunately you do find a few here amidst the mostly intelligent posts who are here to bang their tattered drum of political prejudice that is so irrelevant to this debacle, and which tends to ignore the fact that the instigators here and in most of Europe has actually been right of centre governments.
The fact that this undermines the their mickey-mouse thesis, framed in pathetically outmoded terms, tends to pass them by.
The huge turn out last week worried them. A lot. An organic mass gathering of the people, using nothing more than grapevine in a lot of instances, to get out their message out. So now they’ve gone into overdrive with their little, masked, controlled puppets, and their fake protests. And that’s it – they only control that group. But they know millions know what’s really going on, and they see straight through these pretend protests. And the truth is getting out. I’ve seen people talking and reporting and sharing on last Saturday’s march, in Mexico, US, Canada, Australia, and else where. It’s going to get very interesting…
It’s true what you say. The fabulous edited highlights of the march produced by Oracle films has been shared widely, even appearing on the American Institute for Economic Research website. Just wait for the next one !
https://www.aier.org/article/the-anti-lockdown-movement-is-large-and-growing/
Am I alone in hoping that the complacent attitude of the press over these issues comes back and bites them hard.
They’re already getting bitten. One of theirs got beaten up by the police at the Bristol KTB protest.
LOL! The sheer irony of people protesting against a law that supresses protests while they are wearing masks? Hahahaha!
… but I’m not laughing at this mass lobotomy.
All I hear when I see the ‘Kill the Bill’ protestors is “baa”, “baa”…
The Ascent of Man
I see that there were big anti-lockdown protests in Canada this weekend – Lee Hurst jokingly alludes to the big anti-lockdown protest in London last week that was largely ignored by the UK msm.
A great film of the march that took place on the 24th April can be found on Oracle Films. It is 6 minutes long and perfectly captures the sheer size and good will of the vast crowd who marched. It truly was an example of strength and unity in action. Watching this wonderful demonstration it become clear why no honest reporting of the event made it to the MSN and why the police left it until the last minute, when the march was over and only a few hundred remained resting and socialising in the park before steaming in to the get the kind of photos they wanted.
ps. It might be necessary to sign on to Telegram to see the film.
Here it is…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TLHOjsuy7FY
Yesterdays roundup, ‘Covid March BBC has questions to answer’.
Yes, this is exactly what you would expect of the BBC. The corporation abandoned any pretence at impartial news reporting years ago and is now stuffed to the gunnels with political activists. The failure of the government to decriminalize non-payment of the licence fee is just another example of its sheer incompetence.
Right from the start of this over a year ago things just haven’t made sense: It’s not dangerous/it’s very dangerous and a disaster. Mutations are not a worry/mutations are the real danger. It’s not airborne/it’s airborne, you must not wear a mask/you must wear a mask. Loss of taste or smell is not a symptom/it’s a major symptom. Asymptomatic spread. Even from a few weeks in I was constantly thinking (as a mechanical engineer used to doing comparable investigations in engineering), why haven’t they done this simple bit of research/testing, haven’t they got an answer for that question yet, why did it take so long to do such a simple test/analysis etc. Why am I as complete amateur with no resources and just a few minutes a day analysing the data often apparently many weeks ahead of their experts. The continual silencing of alternative expert views even when some of them later turn out to be right. We seem to be making great progress towards treatments, then all of a sudden they don’t work and are dangerous or we need to do the proper time consuming trials to get approval contradicting the claim vaccines (that you can’t undo once done) are ok without finishing the trials but something that has had proper trials cannot be repurposed, work on treatments seems to be discouraged, the story goes very quiet. The constantly changing story since vaccine rollout. The absolute obsession with vaccines. Vaccine passports don’t seem to make sense if vaccines only halve transmission but the passport allows people to travel and mingle without the same precautions as the increasingly rare unvaccinated person. The rewriting of laws. The ignoring or misrepresentation of protests. Surely, even if you only got all your news from the BBC, if you’re paying attention shouldn’t you at the very least be thinking what happened to the days when they’d question things, something doesn’t quite add up.
and also compare the manchester united protest yesterday (Sunday) – a thousand or so supporters involved. Lead item on BBC 22.00 news. a 5 minute report.
A perfect indication of what the bbc deem as newsworthy and what should be ignored
Unofficial media rule: a protest has to be moral-panic-worthy to be reported.
protesters who wear masks and hoodies do so for the simple reason they cannot be identified. Many BLM protesters are paid activists who travel around Europe. We know this because we who march peacefully see the same behaviour, clothes, hear the languages etc etc. There are some ANTIFA students who are well known to be on peaceful protests just to cause trouble.
Unfortunately the police have chosen to side with Government policy rather than the people whom they are paid to protect and who give their consent to be policed.
The days of policing by consent are nearly at an end. The police State is almost on us and those who will not accept this and wake up are those very people who will be the first to scream when the knock on the door at midnight comes
5000 organised Manchester United supporters certainly managed to outwit the authorities yesterday. They attacked on 3 different fronts, which is perhaps a way shutdown, freedom restriction protests need to go, makes the state’s restriction plans much more difficult.
It is now the tale of three protest. Front page of Telegraph today pictures the storm in a sporting teacup at Old Trafford and then has five pages on it in the sports section (and not a word about Hull City’s promotion to the Championhsip!) and they didn’t, if I recall correctly, mention the lockdown protests last weekend.
The masks say it all.
The Bill, if passed, will extend the covid-era totalitarianism into “peacetime” by letting police ban any protest they feel like banning, and lock-up anyone considered to have caused “disruption” (for example by making a noise or blocking a road). If you think this will be limited to use against whichever protesters you don’t like, then look at what’s happened with all the forerunners.
A lot of people, especially in poorer areas, are extremely alienated from the police. As Peter Hitchens has shown, the police degenerated into a paramilitary militia during the Blair years. They police to politicians’ or chief constables’ rules, not the law. There’s probably a few good ones – seeing one or two on here is evidence of this – but most of them were quite happy to terrorise people during lockdowns, and some had a total power-trip. The anger is strongest among young people because of aggressive and pointless policing at sites with lots of young people – beach and park parties, university halls etc.
The news coverage of the anti-lockdown protest was despicable – basically a media blackout. However, much of the media blacks-out all nonviolent protests. The BBC coverage of the Kill the Bill protests in Bristol have also been despicable. Firstly they only cover the protests if there’s something they can call “violence”. Second, they basically ran the police press release as news on the first “riot”, and didn’t cover police brutality until days later. People who were there say the police attacked the crowd and beat people who were doing a peaceful sit-in, before driving vans into the crowd and almost killing people (ever wonder why the vans were in harms’ way?) On the second event they reported a “riot” which never happened, basically the police beat up a crowd of peaceful protesters and the media called it a riot.
I agree with criticisms of compulsory masking, but I also think it’s quite sensible to wear masks on protests (whether or not the protest is illegal) in current near-totalitarian conditions. Nobody knows when police are going to attack a protest, make random snatch-squad arrests, or initiate clashes with sections of the crowd. Can you be absolutely sure you won’t hit back or “resist arrest” or yell something offensive at a cop, if they just broke your head open and they’re beating a woman next to you for no reason? Even if you can, they can still try to frame you for “violent disorder” because you were part of a crowd which fought back. If the Bill is passed this will extend to being able to charge you with “public nuisance” because the crowd you were part of was marching along a road and traffic couldn’t pass, or people were chanting and making noise – even if there was no violence, no property damage, just a protest. They also maintain huge databases and will add to these the details of what demos you’ve been seen on. Before you know it, you’re profiled as a domestic extremist and you’re getting singled out for wrongful arrests, home raids, searches, interrogations at the border, blacklisting, frame-ups, etc. This is all pretty standard for totalitarian regimes. The left is slightly ahead of the curve because they’ve been targeted in this way for 15 years now. But everyone else is going to have to catch up pretty quickly.