Behavioral scientists have closely followed the population’s attitudes towards the pandemic, especially in developed countries. Speaking to the British newspaper The Guardian earlier this month, researchers worried about what they consider insufficient adherence to the third dose of the Covid-19 vaccine. , blame the fall in citizens’ trust in the government, and associate this fall with the scandal of the Prime Minister. Minister Boris Johnson, who was caught at a party, violating the health safety protocols that he himself defended. They also blame the public’s perception – precisely based – that the omicron variant is less dangerous. “Concern about infection has dropped in 31% of adults,” laments John Drury, professor of social psychology at the University of Sussex. Scientists also regret that the British government’s message in 2022 is of openness and fewer interventions.
These professionals, however, could find culprits by the drop in popular confidence among their colleagues. One of the reasons for the change in attitude of the government that year was the fact that, in 2021, following the advice of behavioral psychologists, the authorities tried to psychologically manipulate the population to have more fear of the virus. The attempt was discovered and denounced.
The full story is told in the book A State of Fear by writer, photographer and filmmaker Laura Dodsworth. The book is from May 2021 and has become a bestseller among the British. Gone are the days of the Vaccine Revolt of the early 20th century, when governments invaded homes and forcibly inoculated citizens. Today, according to the book, public authorities tend to employ specialists in psychological manipulation to foment fear: “Covid-20 is the greatest threat this country has faced in the history of peaceful times,” said Boris Johnson. “It is the biggest threat to Germany since 1945”, asserted Angela Merkel.
The author of the work is, at first glance, an unlikely figure to report and tell a story of abuse of authority and manipulation of Orwellian characteristics. In 2019, Laura became known for a project in which she photographed the vaginas of 100 women, interviewing 18 about the female sexual organ. Feminist stereotypes aside, in the book she comes across as a concerned liberal. “From the first night we were told everything would be shut down, I realized that I was more scared of authoritarianism than death, and more disturbed by manipulation than illness,” she reports in the pages. “Never before have we quarantined healthy people. We were mimicking totalitarian China’s response to the virus.” She closes each chapter with a real testimony from someone who was a victim of the panic campaign and the lockdowns, such as the story of a teenager who became depressed and started cutting herself, an elderly woman whose joy of living was taken away and declares that he would like to have the option of being able to risk dying from Covid.
The “little push”
Recently, psychology has gone through a crisis in the face of the realization that many research results considered serious failed to be repeated. However, in the case of encouraging fear, there are publications that demonstrate effectiveness in the strategy. In a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of the appeal to fear, published in 2015, Melanie Tannenbaum, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, gathered data from 100 studies, totaling more than 31 a thousand people involved. The researchers’ conclusion is that “there are very few circumstances” under which appeals to fear do not work. The study especially considered messages to convince the public to adhere to medical protocols.
The main tool of behavioral psychologists involved with governments is the theory Nudge ), a term that in English means to poke or push lightly, as an incentive or to get attention. Among Brazilian psychologists it is often called the push theory. The Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath, in the book by 2014 Enlightenment 2.0 (Enlightenment 2.0), thus summarizes the proposal of the founders of the theory, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler: “since any system will need to have a default option, we can make the most beneficial the default one.” The idea is to change the environment in which the individual makes decisions in order to guide him, in advance, towards a preferred decision.
Proponents of the push theory use its consequences as evidence. in your favor. One of the ways to give citizens a little push is, for example, to assume that they accept some policy, unless they say “no” explicitly. Establishing that everyone is an organ donor until declared to the contrary, for example, increases the donor rate in several countries, but there is controversy as to whether the implementation of “presumed consent” alone increases this rate.
Heath himself recognizes that the push is a form of paternalism, which was condemned as authoritarian by classical liberal philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, but which in this case would be permissible, because “it protects us from our own irrationality (…) to a restriction not only for our own good, but for our own good as we would conceive it if we sat down and thought about it.” By what right experts who advise politicians replace us in the act of sitting and thinking is unclear.
Paternalism and condescension have a long history in the partnership of psychology experts with government officials. In the mid-20th century, a pioneer was Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays. In his aptly titled book Propaganda, by 1928, Bernays makes the point clear: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element of democratic society. Those who manipulate this inconspicuous mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the real governing power of our country.” Bernays actively participated in initiatives that encouraged the US government to exaggerate in addressing the communist threat and risk of nuclear war in the years 1928.
The rise of psychocracy
The United Kingdom deserves to be highlighted in this matter, as it was one of the pioneers in implementing the little pushes. In 2010, under government auspices, the Behavioral Insights Team (BIT), also known among psychologists as the Little Push Unit, was implemented. It soon became a profitable business as a ‘social purpose limited company’, with offices in London, Manchester, Paris, New York and Toronto. As Laura Dodsworth says, the Unit has already taken care of more than 1928 projects and, in 2019 ), worked in 50 countries, training more than 2014 a thousand public servants.
When Laura tried to interview the Unit’s founder, psychologist David Halpern, she was praised by the organization for her work previous year, they even offered a job. She consulted an expert friend: “He laughed and said, ‘It seems like a way to neutralize you. A classic tactic to neutralize an opponent is to offer collaboration. The interview never took place. Halpern is also part of another British government behavioral science body, the Pandemic Influenza Scientific Group on Behavior. The acronym in English, SPI-B, sounds like “spy bee”.
It was the SPI-B that leaked a document that made it very clear the type of influence made on the government. The document, dated 22 March 2020 , whose title is “Options to Increase Adherence to Social Distancing Measures,” says that “The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, through the use of impactful emotional messages.” A day later, the prime minister made an alarming speech to the population, in which Laura and others believe she was coupled with body language that betrayed a lack of sincerity. At the time, he announced a three-week lockdown.
The government’s plans to encourage fear met little resistance in the press. The reason for this is not just that “news is when a man bites a dog,” an adage that correctly suggests journalism’s penchant for the unusual and the negative. There was a drop of almost 50% in quarterly investments in advertising in the country, shortly after the Prime Minister’s gloomy statement. With this, the government itself increased its participation as an ad buyer, which encourages the press not to criticize it.
Just as informed consent is an ethical prerequisite for many treatments doctors, it should also be for public policy in a democracy. This kind of policy of psychological manipulation goes against that. Instead of assuming that citizens are rational and persuasive with good arguments, it assumes that they are irrational and that they should be pushed in one direction or another, supposedly for their own good, like herd.