This rhetoric seemed unlikely to spook any of the vaccine-hesitant into getting jabbed. After all, they have already been exposed to plenty of dire warnings about the virus, and are unlikely to be receptive to the admonitions of an administration they have already ignored. Rather, the real addressees of Zients’s sermon were the vaccinated, who could assure themselves that they are on the side of the good.

Early in the Covid era, many believed the virus had made clear that “we’re all in this together”. The pandemic, we were told, would instil a sense of collective responsibility premised on our biological interconnectedness. Yet the reality, starkly revealed by Zients’s proclamation, is that we have entered a new age of biopolitical balkanisation, evident not only in the drastic policy divergence between red and blue states but also in the latter’s attempts to exclude the unvaccinated from public life.

Zients’s boss, Joe Biden, campaigned on the idea that technocratic competence and faith in expertise would end the pandemic. He also promised to scale back the culture wars of the Trump era. “We can,” he said in his inaugural address, “join forces, stop the shouting, and lower the temperature.” This may have been standard political pablum, but it reflected a genuine hope that a less divisive — even pleasantly boring — four years might follow the tumultuous Trump era.

Instead, a year into the Biden administration, we have seen a ratcheting up of the propagandistic weaponisation of “science” and a series of self-inflicted blows to the credibility of experts. Much has been said about the CDC’s inconsistent messaging, and during the current Omicron surge, as during previous surges, the administration has been criticised both for being overly aggressive and overly timid. But underlying these inconsistencies is a new mode of liberal technocratic governance, driven by moralising fervour and partisan animus rather than calm neutrality and rational calculation.

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This new strategy of rule places Biden’s administration in contrast with Barack Obama’s, in which he served as Vice President. Although the soaring rhetoric of his 2008 campaign sometimes suggested otherwise, Obama was motivated by a conviction that competent management, not visionary speeches, could unite the nation. The former law professor’s wonkish impulses and academic connections led him to the burgeoning field of behavioural economics, in particular the work of his erstwhile University of Chicago colleague Cass Sunstein, who served as his regulatory tsar between 2009 and 2012.

Sunstein pioneered the approach known as the “nudge”, which gave the title to the 2008 book he co-authored with Richard Thaler. Instead of mandating or proscribing behaviours, Sunstein suggested, governments might alter “choice architecture” to tacitly incentivise desired behaviours and discourage undesired ones. An oft-cited instance is making opt-in the default on certain decisions, like signing up for retirement contributions or the organ donor registry. These apparently small changes, “nudgers” believed, could re-engineer mass behaviour in a prosocial direction. Sunstein and Thaler, David V. Johnson notes, claimed to have “found the Golden Mean between Reagan free-market conservatism and FDR state-guided liberalism”. Their ideas had a natural appeal to a president who had promised to overcome the divisions between red and blue America.

During his second term, Obama signed an executive order committing the government to “using behavioural science insights” and launched a Social and ‘Behavioral Science Team’ that put “nudge theory” into practice. The results of these initiatives were modest. For example, the administration attempted to use text message reminders to increase college matriculation among low-income high school graduates. Such efforts, a reminder of the pre-2016 period when tinkering around the edges of the possible was still seen as a noble and vital mode of governance, seem quaint today.

In his writings, Sunstein directly contrasts nudge-type efforts with mandates, and argues the former are preferable because they are “choice-preserving”. For example, making green energy preferences on utilities the default option predisposes consumers towards environmentally favourable choices, but still gives them an escape. To those chafing against Covid mandates, this “libertarian paternalism” might seem preferable to the current style of Democratic governance.

But behavioural economics also received its share of criticisms at the peak of its influence. Critics argued that nudge-type policies are often attempts to bypass collective deliberation on issues of common concern. Yet this was one of the sources of their appeal: after the 2010 midterms, the White House faced a hostile Congress that thwarted Obama’s ambitions. For an executive boxed in in this way, as Johnson remarked in the final months of the administration, “a nudge can secure policy success without requiring Congressional approval”.

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In the Covid era, the Biden administration and its state-level allies have made a hard pivot away from the nudge approach towards an embrace of mandates. The presumed justification for this shift is that the severity of the Covid crisis required more drastic measures. But something else differentiates Covid technocracy from its predecessors: a remarkable incuriosity about whether the strictures it imposes actually work. This incuriosity has become all the more glaring in recent weeks, as Omicron has brought cases to unprecedented levels in cities like New York, where both vaccine passports and mask mandates are in effect.

The nudge approach, on the other hand, is at least ostensibly outcome-oriented: it assesses interventions on the basis of their measurable impact. So one of the problems with mandates, from the nudgers’ perspective, is that they risk conflating intention and outcome. Mandates are often difficult to enforce and generate backlashes, and thus may prove counterproductive. But they may remain in force, despite failing to achieve their objectives, because they demonstrate a moral commitment to a desired aim.

And as Zients’s holiday announcement demonstrated, when mandates fail to achieve the desired results, it is the fault of those who don’t follow the rules, not those who imposed them. A more empirical approach would treat the reality of noncompliance as part of what needs to be measured in order to assess the efficacy of a proposed policy. But such a strategy would imply that the technocrats themselves, rather than the anti-vaxxers or anti-maskers, should be held accountable for policy failures. Small wonder it has fallen out of favour.

Before last year it might have seemed obvious that the guiding ethos of technocracy was cold utilitarian calculus, but in the past two years it has become something like the opposite: moral fervour. Various factors brought about this shift, but the reaction of the technocrats and their constituency to Trump, with his “war on the administrative state” and love of the “poorly educated”, was arguably the crucial one. Tinkering behind the scenes, as was favoured in the Obama era, was no longer a viable approach for a class that felt its interests threatened.

Early on in the pandemic, the writer Alex Hochuli described the pandemic as “technocracy’s end-of-life rally”. At least temporarily, it had put the experts maligned over the previous half-decade back in the drivers’ seat. But the populist fervour that had driven the Trump movement re-energised itself in reaction to lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. Initially, this seemed to place the technocrats in an unassailable position, since they could impugn their allies as aiders and abettors of disease and death.

However, this high ground is illusory: the track record of their mandates has proven middling at best. For instance, Los Angeles county, with vaccine and mask mandates, fared no better after implementing them — slightly worse, in fact — than neighbouring Orange County, which had neither. Furthermore, vaccine mandates for health care workers, many of whom already have immunity from prior Covid infection, have led to staffing shortages nationwide as reluctant workers have resigned or been fired, leaving hospitals worse-prepared to confront the Omicron case surge. The refusal to acknowledge such failures and tradeoffs is even more self-discrediting.

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But there is also a more profound issue at play: while technocrats’ rule by moral fiat has allowed some critics to be bludgeoned into submission, it also exacerbates the deeper problem of governance by unelected bureaucrats in a system nominally premised on the consent of the governed. Sunstein and his Obama-era acolytes were aware of this risk even if their project was informed by anti-democratic assumptions. This was why they were so concerned to preserve at least nominal freedom of choice on the part of citizens.

Biden, however, seems to have forgotten this. His administration’s devotion to mandates, regardless of the evidence piling up against them, looks more and more like a punitive backlash against political enemies. Far from a means of transcending hyperpartisan antagonism, as both Obama and Biden once promised, technocratic management has become another means of pursuing it. Public health messaging has become another opportunity for partisan pep rallies — and America will suffer for it.

Rules are meant to codify some bit of rational truth and make it effective. These days, we find ourselves in situations where to do the genuinely rational thing might require breaking the rules of some institution. But to do so is to invite confrontation. You may go through an internal struggle, deciding how much resistance to put up. To insist on reasons is to be ornery, and you want to be sociable. You tell yourself, there is no point in being confrontational with staff at the YMCA who are themselves simply carrying out orders. There is nobody visible to whom you can address your reasons, nobody of whom you can demand an account.

After a year and a half of this, going along with it starts to become habitual. If you defy the mask order, and are challenged by somebody doing their job as instructed, chances are you’re going to back down and comply, which is worse than if you had complied to begin with. Even if you strongly suspect fear of the virus has been stoked out of proportion to serve bureaucratic and political interests, or as an artefact of the scaremongering business model of media, you may subtly adjust your view of the reality of Covid to bring it more into line with your actual behaviour. You can reduce the dissonance­ that way. The alternative is to be confronted every day with fresh examples of your own slavishness.

In the Hobbesian formula, the Leviathan relies upon fear to suppress pride. It is pride that makes men difficult to govern. It may be illuminating to view our Covid moment through this lens and consider how small moments of humiliation may be put in the service of a long-standing political project, or find their meaning and normative force in it.

Specifically, to play one’s part in Covid theatre, as in security theatre at the airport, is to suffer the unique humiliation of a rational being who submits to moments of social control that he knows to be founded upon untruths. That these are expressed in the language of science is especially grating.

We need to consider the good faith intellectual positions that greased the skids for our slide into an illiberal form of governance. For, in addition to the political opportunism surrounding Covid, there were also well-meaning efforts to control the pandemic by altering people’s behaviour. The question is: what were the means employed for doing this, and what was the view of human beings that made such means attractive? What we got, in the end, without anyone really intending it, may fairly be called a propaganda state that seeks to manipulate without persuading.

Here, “science” may be plainly anti-scientific, according to the circumstances. The word does not name a mode of inquiry, rather it is invoked to legitimise the transfer of sovereignty from democratic to technocratic bodies, and as a device for insulating such transfers from the realm of political contest. Can this be squared with the idea of representative government?

The Columbia law professor Philip Hamburger writes about the administrative state. It consists of a vast array of executive agencies that empower themselves to place people under binding obligations without recourse to legislation, sidestepping the Constitution’s separation of powers. In theory, only Congress can make laws. Its members are subject to the democratic process, so they must persuade their constituents, and one another. But as the administrative state has metastasised, supplanting the lawmaking power of the legislature, unelected bureaucrats increasingly set the contours of modern life with little accountability. They stake their legitimacy on claims of expertise rather than alignment with popular preferences. This trajectory began a century ago in the Progressive era, and took large strides forward during the New Deal and Great Society.

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Hamburger puts this in historical context with other forms of unaccountable power, such as the notorious Star chamber of James I: “Ever tempted to exert more power with less effort, rulers are rarely content to govern merely through the law, and in their restless desire to escape its pathways, many of them try to work through other mechanisms.”

The “restless desire to escape” the inconvenience of law is one that progressives are especially prone to in their aspiration to transform society: merely extant majorities of opinion, and the legislative possibilities that are circumscribed by them, typically inspire not deference but impatience.

It is as beings capable of reason that the legislature is supposed to “represent” us. The judicial branch regards us in the same light. When a court issues a decision, the judge writes an opinion in which he explains his reasoning. He grounds the decision in law, precedent, common sense, and principles that he feels obliged to articulate and defend. This is what transforms the decision from mere fiat into something that is politically legitimate under the premises of republican government, capable of securing the assent of a free people. It constitutes the difference between simple power and authority.

The Nineties saw the rise of new currents in the social sciences that emphasised the cognitive incompetence of human beings. The “rational actor” model of human behaviour (a simplistic premise that had underwritten the party of the market for the previous half century) was deposed by the more psychologically informed school of behavioural economics, which teaches that our actions are largely guided by pre-reflective cognitive biases and heuristics. These biases tend to be functional, both in the sense that they reflect general patterns of reality, and because they offer “fast and frugal” substitutes for deliberation, which is a slow and costly activity. An adjacent thought can be found in phenomenological writers such as Merleau-Ponty and Hubert Dreyfus: the kind of thinking that consists of chains of propositional statements and logical inferences is a special case, not typical of animals with bodies. We are one such animal, and our everyday coping with the world must have a certain fluency to it, if we are not to be paralysed.

The developments in psychology that gave rise to behavioural economics provided a necessary revision to our under­standing of the human person, in the direction of realism. For the narrowly economistic “rational market actor” anthropology of the choosing self was indeed inadequate.

In their book Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein point out that individual choices don’t usually happen in a vacuum. They are often sculpted by a “choice architecture” that may be more or less deliberate in its design, but generally operates beneath the threshold of awareness, as a kind of background cognitive scaffolding. A classic example is the placement of items on grocery store shelves. High margin items tend to be placed at eye level, while impulse purchases are placed in the slow-moving checkout line. Sugary cereals are placed at a child’s eye level, so the kid will nag his mother for some Lucky Charms.

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Why not exploit the power of choice architecture for the public good, and replace the Lucky charms with Brussels sprouts? Doing so has an obvious appeal. It is a non-coercive way to improve people’s behaviour without having to persuade them of anything. This offered obvious encouragement to the paternalistic tendencies of the administrative state. Following the publication of Nudge in 2009, both the Obama White House and the government of David Cameron in the UK established “nudge” units to operationalise the insights of behavioral economics. The examples that the nudgers like to offer by way of illustrating their techniques are uncontroversial – things like increasing the savings rate, or getting people to stop smoking.

As Thaler and Sunstein like to point out when they are on the defensive, they didn’t invent nudging, they merely gave it a name and articulated its principles in the language of social science. But this articulation has been highly consequential. When something banal is presented as a scientific finding, it becomes available to institutions, part of their toolkit for “evidence based interventions.”

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“Behavioral insight” teams inspired by Nudge are currently operating in the European Commission, the United Nations, the WHO and, by Thaler’s reckoning, about 400 other entities in government and the NGO world, as well as in countless private corporations. It would be hard to overstate the degree to which this approach has been institutionalised.

In a recent interview with UnHerd, Thaler insisted that the nudge is simply a tool, one that can be used for good or ill. But, as with so many technological innovations, the availability of the tool alters the range of possibilities. Indeed, it alters the way objects in the world show up for the one who holds the tool. The innovation achieved here, at scale, is in the way government conceives its subjects: not as citizens whose considered consent must be secured, but as particles to be steered through a science of behavior management that relies on our pre-reflective biases.

One example that Thaler and Sunstein call attention to, in their advice to administrators, is the “emerging norm” bias. Norms of various descriptions have more or less purchase on us, for reasons one can speculate on endlessly. But if you tell people that some new norm is emerging, they are more likely to identify with it. It seems most people don’t want to be on the Wrong Side of History. So announcing the emergence of some new norm can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, a means of steering the herd. This holds obvious attraction for the vanguardist. It seems to promise that one can mark out the direction of history, and thereby make it so.

Such vanguardists may be ideologues, or they may simply be institutional players who have internalised the expansionary logic of the bureaucracies who employ them. The hygiene state propagandises a “new normal” of social distancing and face covering. Here is an outlandish medical morality of social atomisation, presented as something inevitable.

While economics was getting psychologised in the 1990s, a parallel development was happening in political science. Before getting into this, consider the larger frame. The Soviet Union had just collapsed. This placed “liberal-democracy” in a new situation, or rather returned it to a situation that had obtained in the mid-19^th century.

Liberalism and democracy are two distinct things, not entirely at ease with one another. Their differences were submerged during the Cold War when they had a common enemy in Soviet communism, just as they had been submerged previously when they had a common enemy in monarchy.

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When monarchy was finally eliminated as a rival to democracy in the revolutions of 1848, the alliance of convenience between liberalism and democracy threatened to break down. By 1861, John Stuart Mill was terrified that democratic majorities would constrain a liberalism consisting of “experiments in living.” The freedom of educated elites to explore new cultural terrain and projects of self-cultivation would require jettisoning religious interdictions, as well as the parochial affections and commitments by which the masses took their bearings. The basic problem was that such a liberatory project gets its political legitimacy by allying itself with democracy — first against monarchy, and then against communism.

As Adrian Vermeule puts it, liberalism fears that its dependence on and fundamental difference from democracy will be exposed if a sustained course of non-liberal popular opinion comes to light. The solution is to offer an idealised concept of democracy, sharply distinguished from “mere majoritarianism.” By this device, the liberal may get to preserve his self-understanding as a democrat. This can become quite strained, as in the reflex to call the popularly elected governments of Poland and Hungary “antidemocratic”. When Pew did opinion polling in Afghanistan a decade ago and found that something like 95% of respondents expressed a preference that sharia law should be the law of the land, this was not allowed to interrupt the conviction that making Afghanistan “democratic” would require a feminist social transformation. That is, an explicitly anti-majoritarian revolution.

Back to the Nineties. The hot career track for my cohort of Ph.D students in the political science department was to build up a theoretical edifice to strengthen the hyphen in “liberal-democracy”, kind of like Ptolemy’s addition of epicycles and other intricacies to the geocentric model of the solar system in an effort to save it from an accumulating body of observation. The political theorists of my generation did this under a rubric they called “deliberative democracy.” There was a quarrel at the time between Habermas and Rawls, and it was Rawls who insisted on this crucial point: if you could just establish the right framing conditions for deliberation, the demos would arrive at acceptably liberal positions. We should be able to formalise these conditions, it was thought. And conversely, wherever the opinions of the demos depart from an axis running roughly from the editorial page of the New York Times to that of the Wall Street Journal, it was taken to be prima facie evidence that there was some distorting influ­ence in the discursive conditions under which people were conducting their thought processes, or their conversations among themselves. The result was opinion that was not authentically democratic (i.e., not liberal).

Obviously, the prospect of populism was already causing some anxiety. Propping up “liberal-democracy” as a conceptual unity would require a cadre of subtle dia­lecticians working at a meta-level on the formal conditions of thought, nudging the populace through a cognitive framing operation to be conducted beneath the threshold of explicit argument. I remember there was one grad student in my department who was running experiments on focus groups, seeing if he could get them to think the right thoughts.

To my unsympathetic eye, this looked like an exercise in self-delusion by aspiring apparatchiks for whom a frankly elitist posture would have been psychologically untenable. I don’t know if that grad student got his subjects to think the right thoughts. But I have little doubt he got them to say the right thoughts, and thereby lend those thoughts the demotic imprimatur he was looking for. Maybe that was good enough. Political correctness might be understood as a device that became necessary for liberalism to continue to claim the mantle of democracy, even as prosecution of its program would require increasingly antidemocratic measures.

As it turns out, the best way to secure the discursive conditions for “deliberative democracy”, and install a proper choice architecture that will nudge the demos in the right direction, is to curate information. Soon, the Internet would both enable and undermine these aspirations.

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Of all the platform firms, Google is singular. Its near-monopoly on search (around 90%) puts it in a position to steer thought. And increasingly, it avows the steering of thought as its unique responsibility. In an important article titled “Google.gov”, law professor Adam J. White details both the personnel flows and deep intellectual affini­ties between Google and the Obama White House. Hundreds of people switched jobs back and forth, some of them multiple times, between this one firm and the administration over eight years – an unprecedented alignment of corporate power and the executive branch. White writes that both aspired to “reshape Americans’ informational context, ensuring that we make choices based only upon what they consider the right kind of facts—while denying that there could be any values or politics embedded in the effort.”

One of the central tenets of progressives’ self-understanding is that they are pro-fact and pro-science, while their opponents (often the majority) are said to have an unaccountable aversion to these good things: they cling to fond illusions and irrational anxieties. It follows that good governance means giving people informed choices. This is not the same as giving people what they think they want, according to their untutored preferences. Informed choices are the ones that make sense within a well-curated informational context.

There is a distinct epistemic style that progressive politics took on during the mutual infatuation of Google and Obama. Here the idea of neutrality or objectivity is deployed to assert an identity between what liberals want to do and the interests of demos. This identity reveals itself once distortions of objective reality are cleared away.

Speaking at Google’s headquarters in 2007, Obama said he would use “the bully pulpit to give them good information.” The bully pulpit has previously been understood as a perch from which to attempt persuasion. Persuasion is what you do if you are engaged in democratic politics. Curating information, on the other hand, is what you do if you believe dissent from your outlook can only be due to a failure to properly process the relevant information. A cognitive failure, that is.

In the Founders Letter that accompanied Google’s 2004 initial public offering, Larry Page and Sergey Brin said their goal is “getting you exactly what you want, even when you aren’t sure what you need.” The perfect search engine would do this “with almost no effort” on the part of the user. In a 2013 update to the Founders Letter, Page said that “the search engine of my dreams provides information without you even having to ask.” Minimizing the user’s active input, Google will answer, not the question you might have posed yourself, but the question you should have asked. As Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal, “[O]ne idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you having to type. . . . I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

The firm will provide a kind of mental scaffold for us, guiding our intentions by shaping our informational context. This is to take the idea of trusteeship and install it in the infrastructure of thought.

But this effort has more or less failed, due to the proliferation of unauthorised voices on the Internet. The pandemic prompted clumsy efforts to regain control, and these have often backfired.

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If we credit “public health” with any purposeful coherence, we might suppose the confusion it sowed was an unintended effect of approaching behavior modification as a game theoretical problem. In game theory, one assumes that people are self-interested maximizers of their own utility and tries to manipulate them based on this premise, which is sometimes best accomplished by sending deceptive signals. For example, early in the pandemic we were told masks don’t work, because the priority was to preserve a scarce supply of masks for health workers. More recently, the relative risks of the virus versus the vaccine for different demographics has been dismissed as irrelevant, for the sake of combatting vaccine hesitancy. But such deceptions, however well-intended, can succeed only if you have control over the flow of information. So once you go down this road of departing from the truth, you’re committed to censorship and rigorous narrative enforcement, which is very difficult to do in the Internet era.

The absurdities of COVID theatre could be taken as a tacit recognition of this state of affairs, much as security theater pointed to a new political accommodation after 9/11. In this accommodation, we have accepted the impossibility of grounding our practices in reality. We submit to ossified bureaucracies such as the TSA that have become self-protective interest groups. They can expand but never contract, and we must pretend reality is such as to justify their existence. Covid is likely to do for public health what 9/11 did for the security state. Going through an airport, we still take off our shoes – because twenty years ago, some clown tried to light his shoe on fire. We submit to being irradiated and groped, often as not. One tries to put out of mind facts such as this: in independent audits of airport security, about 80-90% of weapons pass through undetected. The microwave machine presents an imposing image of science that helps us bury such knowledge. We have a duty to carry out an ascetic introspection, searching out any remaining tendencies toward rational pride and regard for the truth, submitting them to analysis. Similarly, the irrationality of the Covid rules we comply with has perhaps become their main point. In complying, we enact the new terms of citizenship.

Behavioural science — a catch-all term for a strand of psychology, with micro-economics, sociology and other disciplines mixed in — has been unusually prominent during the pandemic, and particularly so in the UK. For a while at the start of 2020, it was touted as the answer to all our prayers. “Nudges” to change people’s behaviours were suddenly the order of the day. “Behavioural science can”, we were assured, “save lives”; without it, “our attempts to defeat the virus will fail”. On the BMJ’s blog, UCL psychologist Susan Michie and her colleagues wrote a post entitled: “Behavioural science must be at the heart of the public health response to Covid-19”. Boris Johnson himself was directly advised by “behavioural psychologists”, and specifically referenced them at a press conference.

At the end of March, just after lockdown began, I wrote for UnHerd about the bad predictions and faulty logic of psychologists (and other people writing about risk). I argued that low-quality evidence was being relied on to support arguments that downplayed the danger of the disease. But the story of our Government’s engagement with behavioural science during this pandemic extends far beyond that. Now that a whole year has passed since the UK recorded its first Covid cases, it’s a good time to look back at what the much-lauded discipline contributed to our Covid response.

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Behavioural science had great press for a few weeks, but it all fell apart pretty fast. As case numbers and deaths in the UK increased throughout March, many began to wonder why we weren’t following the example of other countries and locking down. The blame, according to some, lay at the feet of the behavioural scientists. Apparently, they’d advised the Government that the population would suffer “behavioural fatigue” — that after just a few weeks of strict lockdown measures, we’d get bored and frustrated, and start bending the rules in an attempt to get back to normal life.

Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty, Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jenny Harries, Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance, and others all made this argument explicitly in the media. It would be counter-productive to go too hard too soon, they said. Such a huge change to people’s lives wouldn’t be sustainable, and people might make a collective break for freedom just as the virus was most prevalent.

But behavioural scientists, whose discipline was supposedly the basis of the Government’s policy, were outraged by this narrative. Michie, a member of the Government’s SAGE subcommittee on behavioural science, SPI-B, told the Guardian that the concept of “fatigue” had never been used in any of their reports (which was true). Indeed, she said, “[fatigue] is just not a concept that exists in behavioural science”. Warwick behavioural scientist Nick Chater agreed, writing that behavioural fatigue “has no basis in science”. Another member of SPI-B, Robert West, made much the same argument. An Open Letter from UK psychologists and behavioural scientists urged the Government to reveal the evidence base for the fatigue concept (I was among nearly 700 signatories).

As it turns out, there was evidence in the scientific literature for the idea of “behavioural fatigue” all along. The neuropsychologist Vaughan Bell, as far back as late March, reviewed a selection of papers (all published pre-2020) that discussed the fatigue idea in the context of people’s rule-compliance in past disease outbreaks, though they didn’t necessarily use the specific word “fatigue”. As Bell noted, some found evidence for it, some against — and the studies certainly weren’t all top-quality. But the idea spread by behavioural scientists before the first lockdown — that “behavioural fatigue” was a concept entirely divorced from the scientific literature — was flat wrong.

So far, so embarrassing: the psychologists either weren’t aware of the relevant evidence, or wanted to shift the blame for the delayed lockdown away from behavioural science (even though they’d never advocated for it). Whitty, Harries and Vallance, for their part, never pointed to any of the science they were relying on to make their claims. Confusion reigned. The lockdown was delayed on the basis of some unknown evidence. Behavioural science seemed to have failed its first and biggest test of the pandemic.

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To make things worse, the “fatigue” debate was essentially irrelevant to what the Government should have been doing in the face of the virus. Regardless of whether people’s compliance with the rules would decay over time, it would still have made sense to lock down earlier, because the virus spreads exponentially. Stopping it from taking hold early in an outbreak (a policy that worked in countries like New Zealand and Taiwan) means that the population — even if they start to break more rules as time goes on — will be at far less risk of the disease. To put it another way: despite the hype, the behavioural science should have been very much secondary, something to worry about only if a government fails to properly contain the spread of infection.

You’ll have noticed, of course, that our government did fail to properly contain the spread of infection. We didn’t lock down early enough — twice — and we’ve now had over 100,000 coronavirus deaths. So perhaps there’s more of a role for behavioural science now. But have we learned anything in the past year about how to mould human behaviour to keep people from Covid?

My behavioural scientist colleagues won’t like me for saying this, but the answer is: not really. A number of recent studies have explored how to improve interventions such as hand-washing, face-touching, mask-wearing, and vaccine-getting. (Let’s leave aside the awkward fact that the first two probably aren’t all that relevant to stopping the spread – the behavioural scientists weren’t to know that at the time.) These interventions are a smorgasbord of tricks to get people thinking differently about the virus: asking them to plan for the future; targeting their emotions; telling them how social distancing can save the economy; focusing them on reasoning rather than gut feelings; and so on — all things that might be adapted into government messaging, if they work.

But do they? Some of them, such as asking a person to write down the name of a loved-one they want to protect, have shown no effects whatsoever. Others, like focusing on moral messages, or those delivered by a respected figure, are supported by patchy evidence that shows generally small effects. Some have shown effects only in particular circumstances: one study tried a range of different interventions and found that some worked, but only for people who had just recently begun social distancing. For those who had been social distancing for longer, the interventions backfired — the participants reported going outside more and distancing less after they’d taken part in the intervention. Oops.

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By Timandra Harkness

Even for the studies that appear more promising, one has to remember what’s actually being measured: in most cases, it’s people’s self-reported intentions to do things like wash their hands or wear masks. It’s what they tick on a questionnaire during the experiment — not necessarily what they’ll do in the real world. Of course, intentions and actions will be related to one another, but not perfectly. Researchers should be a lot more careful than the authors of the questionnaire study that appeared in September, whose very title claimed that “Empathy Promotes Physical Distancing and Wearing of Masks”. The only data they gathered concerned self-assessed motivations — not behaviours. “Intentional science” sounds somewhat less impressive than “behavioural science”, but it would, alas, be much more accurate.

Yet more evidence is appearing all the time: perhaps the behavioural scientists will crack a solid, reliable intervention soon. But the discipline’s contribution to the pandemic feels like a classic case of over-promising and under-delivering. The confident claims at the start of the pandemic — that behavioural science would play a crucial role in the Government’s toolkit to keep us all safe — simply fell flat when the actual data were examined. Had the hype been dialled back a little, behavioural science’s messy evidence base would look more like a discipline doing its best to find out what works (which is a genuinely difficult task), rather than a big disappointment.

Even if our ability to alter human behaviour using clever psychological techniques is weaker than we’d like, it is still useful for understanding human behaviour in the pandemic. To take just one example: knowing what people believe, and how those beliefs change over time, is important for governments and health systems to target their policies.

UCL’s Covid-19 Social Study is packed with interesting data on this topic. One of the overall findings is that people’s compliance with the rules (again, self-reported, so caveat emptor) has waxed and waned along with Covid cases: the recent second wave was accompanied by more people saying they follow all the rules. The main driver of people’s behaviour seems to be how many infections there are in the country (which ultimately depends on government policies like lockdown and border control); “soft” behavioural science interventions like nudges are only going to be useful at the margin.

Suggested reading

The Government's Covid comms failure

By Tom Chivers

To those new UK Government adverts, they seem to be an attempt to use a mixture of empathy, shame and fear to promote compliance. Although there’s plenty of evidence to show that the latter of these has worked in previous contexts, it’s hard to apply any previous research to our unprecedented situation. It certainly feels to me that more attention paid to actual Covid patients, rather than just graphs of case numbers, would jolt people out of complacency — but that’s the hunch of a behavioural scientist, rather than evidence from behavioural science.

And there’s nothing wrong in theory with a behavioural scientist giving you their opinion — if they’re clear that’s what it is. The superficially convincing sheen of “science” is too easily applied to what are often just thoughts and judgements by well-meaning, well-informed experts (or mostly well-informed: the “fatigue” debacle illustrates how even the experts can fail to be on top of their brief). Setting the behavioural scientists up as some kind of oracular group of truth-tellers who’ve figured out the intricacies of the human mind is setting them up for failure — and trivialising the very real contributions they can make.

So can I look you in the eyes and tell you that the new adverts will work? Not really. But what do I know? I’m just a behavioural scientist.