Don’t shoot the behaviourists | thearticle

“The Behaviourists have failed,” stated Professor Ian Linden, juxtaposing behavioural science, a failed pseudoscience, with the proper sciences, in the battle to constrain coronavirus. It

reminded me of the film _Batman vs Superman_. It was a faux battle and the real baddies were whoever produced and directed it. Fighting coronavirus is not an “either/or” battle. It is

“and/and”. A vaccine will be a scientific triumph. Yet success will depend on getting people to take it up and to ignore the anti-vaxxers. That is a question of behaviour. Creating real

change with positive health outcomes linked to behavioural science is well evidenced — think of those campaigns against drink driving, for wearing seat belts, persuading people to react

quickly to the signs of a stroke. Unfortunately, another victim of austerity was the Central Office of Information, which was known for its award-winning work on creating real behavioural

change. Behaviours like “stay 2 metres apart” should not have been left as such abstract concepts that the Prime Minister couldn’t even follow it in person, or at the daily briefings. The

behavioural issue of how the most vulnerable and NHS workers could do their shopping shouldn’t have had to be left to Iceland and Co to resolve. Behavioural science is a powerful tool at our

disposal, and we would be wrong to dismiss it. However, there is a fundamental difference between on the one hand transparently trying to change bad behaviour, and on the other manipulating

people in the way information is presented. Take the Titanic disaster, for example. The reason all those people died on that ship wasn’t an iceberg. It was the behavioural issue known as

the “confirmation bias” of its owners and its Captain. Confirmation bias is the behavioural phenomenon where people would rather accept information that confirms their beliefs, that is easy

and which requires little mental energy eg. “this ship is unsinkable”. Contradictory information causes us to shy away and we tend to discard it. Britain’s slow entry into lockdown and the

weak provision of PPE were both partly because these decisions were harder to do. Three-word slogans like “Take Back Control” and “Get Brexit Done” proved more successful in the Brexit

campaign than detailed expert economic evidence to the contrary, because they were simpler and attached themselves to existing widely-held assumptions. Another popular government behavioural

technique is reframing. When it is pointed out that the UK has the most deaths in Europe due to Covid-19, the reframing response is “you can’t make international comparisons”. Well here is

one. Germany’s assessment of its lockdown relaxation is based on clearly communicating data. Germany knows its R number to 2 decimal places. It is now 1.13, up from 1.1 the day before and

.83 on Friday. The UK national R value is described as somewhere between 0.5 and 0.9. If the Prime Minister has spoken to heads of the devolved governments about his lockdown relaxation

plans he seems to have been ignored. Nicola Sturgeon, for one, has rejected the ambiguous slogan of “Stay Alert”. This raises the question of whether the relaxation of lockdown is suggested

by the data, or whether it’s simply what the Government wants us to do. The selective interpretation of data is not advisable if you want to take the nation with you. On March 3rd, the day

the behavioural group advised against hand shaking and hugging, Johnson declared that he had visited a coronavirus hospital with coronavirus patients and shaken everybody’s hand. This

suggests a somewhat loose relationship with data, on the part of the Prime Minister. Even when the government woke up to the importance of data and the need to test for Covid-19, it set

itself a counter-productive target. The Government could have just stated that the end of April target for testing was a success in creating significant change, but that we didn’t quite make

it. Instead, it stuffed tests in the post to hit a promise on paper for one day only. The campaign playbook that worked so well for Brexit and the election is not just looking dated — but

dangerous. When a poll for the Open Knowledge Foundation revealed only 29 per cent of the UK public believes restricting the public’s right to information is a necessary emergency measure,

you can’t just keep on ignoring it. If you do, then you lose the public’s support. And in a pandemic, that could prove disastrous.