by Rhoda Wilson, Expose News:
The government relied upon psychological experts in 2020 to advise strategies to deploy “non-consensual emotionally discomforting techniques” on the people of the UK which were more often than not in pursuit of their nefarious objectives. There has been a rising awareness of the techniques and strategies used that aimed to promote fear, shame and scapegoating to ensure mass compliance of damaging and ethically dubious interventions and who was responsible for them. Psychologists and behavioural scientists who are implicated as being significantly responsible for advising the strategies however, appear to be denying their involvement in such a process, according to Hart (source).
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NUDGE DENIALISM: Why are the state’s psychological experts distancing themselves from behavioural science?
Is brainwashing no longer in vogue?
By Hart.
The state’s reliance on behavioural science strategies – ‘nudges’ – to facilitate the public’s compliance with covid restrictions has been widely documented. The many psychologists and behavioural scientists advising the government during the covid event (such as those in the SAGE subgroup, SPI-B, and the Behavioural Insight Team, BIT ) have, reasonably, been assumed to hold a significant degree of responsibility for using these methods of persuasion in communication campaigns.
Intriguingly, however, several prominent psychological specialists within these advisory groups have attempted to distance themselves from involvement in nudging, not only from the specific use of fear inflation but also – more recently – from being associated with all forms of this type of furtive persuasion. So what is the evidence that the state’s psychological experts are denying responsibility for the deployment of behavioural science strategies, and what could be motivating these claims?
Contrary to the evidence of the published outputs of the SPI-B and BIT, a series of behavioural experts have claimed zero responsibility for scaring people (the ‘affect’ nudge) into compliance with the covid-19 restrictions and subsequent vaccine rollout. In March 2022, Professor Ann John (a SPI-B co-chair) told a Government’s Science & Technology Committee:
‘We never advised on upping the level of fear. I think it was presented as part of the evidence base… we absolutely advised that fear does not work’.
In March 2023, four members of the SPI-B (Professors Reicher, Michie, Drury, and West) wrote an opinion piece for the British Medical Journal in which they claimed that politicians, not they, were responsible for fear inflation during the covid event:
‘When Hancock & Case advocated scare tactics they were going against the scientific advice they had been given’.
Reicher repeated his innocence plea when he appeared before the Covid-19 Inquiry in January 2024, when he said:
‘One of the criticisms made of SPI-B and of behavioural science in general is that we wanted to use fear to frighten people into adherence, but there is a huge difference between making people realistically aware of threat, so they can do something about it, and fear …So if you give people realistic risk information combined with information about how to mitigate it, actually it doesn’t increase fear, if anything it decreases fear because it empowers people.’
So in Reicher’s world, the multitude of people cowering in their own homes during the covid event were ‘empowered’ rather than fear ridden (see this previous HART article for a more detailed critique of this argument).
Professor David Halpern (the BIT chief) stated in his May 2023 witness statement for the Covid-19 Inquiry:
‘Frustratingly – given our internal advice, and that we didn’t have anything to do with campaigns such as “Stay Alert” (or “Look into her eyes”) BIT was later blamed for encouraging HMG to pursue a fear-based campaign’.
The pleas of blamelessness were repeated by Professor James Rubin (another SPI-B co-chair) in his October 2023 testimony to the Covid-19 Inquiry. When asked directly about his group’s involvement in scaremongering, Rubin claims that they ‘argued against it on multiple occasions’ and also sent a series of internal papers to senior Government officials discouraging the use of fear as a means of promoting compliance.
These serial denials of culpability for the widespread use of scare tactics during the covid event are unconvincing. Although these prominent behavioural scientists may not have been directly involved in the production of the ‘Look them in the eyes’ campaign (arguably, the most disturbing and ethically dubious of all the covid messaging), there are sound reasons to question the veracity of their assertions of innocence: for example, the documented outputs of these high-profile nudgers (collectively, as part of SPI-B and BIT, and – in some instances – individually) have sanctioned the use of fear as a method of promoting compliance; some SPI-B members told investigative journalist, Laura Dodsworth, that the group was not averse to using scare tactics on the British people (A State of Fear, p94); and, despite a highly visible media presence, they did not publicly criticise the covid fearmongering campaign.
