When Behavioural Scientists Misbehave
When Behavioural Scientists Misbehave
A not so hidden secret
BY
“Psychology is no longer just about diagnosing or fixing us, it is now about socially engineering and shaping us. If you don’t control your mind, someone else will.”
Dr Patrick Fagan, behavioural psychologist, University of London
The relationship between psychology and your average climate sceptic is a strange one indeed. On the one hand psychologists are reputed to have generated a “dramatically growing body of research” that demonstrates how our inability to think critically leads to conspiracy ideation. For example, our cognitive failings are presupposed to lead us to think that the public is being unwittingly manipulated as part of some government masterplan. But, on the other hand, it is open knowledge that psychologists have been responsible for developing techniques of behavioural science that have been extensively used by governments to surreptitiously manipulate public opinion. They even have a cute name for the departments involved – they’re called nudge units. So it seems that psychologists are not averse to aiding and abetting social engineering whilst simultaneously pathologizing those amongst us who suspect them of it. Indeed, it may be that the pathologizing is all part of the surreptitious manipulation, since the discrediting of the sceptical voice is important for the nudging to go unnoticed.
Well, I’m sorry, but it has been noticed and no amount of accusatory psychobabble is going to stop me from saying so. It wasn’t my conspiracist imagination that led me to observe the IPCC openly advocating for such manipulation in AR5, WG3, Chapter 2, when it spoke of using “social cognitive theory to develop a model of climate advocacy to increase the attention given to climate change in the spirit of social amplification of risk”. And doesn’t AR5’s talk of “entry points for the design of decision aids and interventions”, “choice architecture”, and “other ways to frame climate change information and response options in ways consistent with the communication goal and characteristics of the audience” all sound a little bit nudgey to you? And what about AR5’s call to “Characterize the likelihood of extreme events and examine their impact on the design of climate change policies”?
Is it really a failure in critical thinking to note that there has been a near hysterical level of reporting of extreme weather in the wake of the IPCC’s AR5 recommendations? Are we supposed to swallow the line that attribution scientists looking at extreme weather patterns suddenly realised that it’s worse than we thought, and so we should no longer see climate change as a purely future risk? My conspiracist mind would find this narrative of a scientific advancement much easier to accept were it not that the scientific ‘revelations’ of a present day risk had been preceded by the AR5 edict to reach out to the public in order to promote that very idea. And it would be a lot easier to accept the narrative had its promotion not been proposed as a good move by behavioural scientists. Whatever the case, every episode of bad weather is now confidently offered as clear proof of the devastation already being wrought, and few in the media seem interested anymore in talking about the essentially statistical nature of climate change’s contribution, nor the uncertainties behind such statistics.
But if you thought that the IPCC’s behavioural scientists were hiding in plain sight, that is as nothing compared to the UK government’s nudge unit — the euphemistically titled Behavioural Insights Team. They even have their own website upon which one can find a number of handbooks going under titles such as ‘Target, Explore, Solution, Trial, Scale’, ‘MINDSPACE’, and ‘Four simple ways to map and unpack behaviour’. It’s as if the magic circle had a website telling you how each trick works. I’d love to indulge my conspiracist ideation but these guys are doing me out of a job. And yet, what can you do when the government itself says on its ‘Behaviour Change’ website:
“Behaviour change is one of the primary functions of government communications – helping change and save lives, helping the government to run more effectively as well as saving taxpayer’s money.”
Government improvement and saving the taxpayer’s money sound laudable enough goals until one realises that methods of behaviour change can also be used for any social engineering of a government’s choosing. These techniques do not come with a moral compass. Take, for example, the techniques that can be employed to ensure public acquiescence in the face of measures designed to remove basics such as free speech and liberty of movement. Just how effective could such measures be? Well, let’s take a look at our Covid-19 experience.
One strategy developed by behavioural scientists sometimes goes by the name Deny, Debate, Demand. It’s a three stage process designed to improve the chances of the public’s acceptance of a radical new measure. Firstly, the unthinkable proposal is ‘accidentally’ leaked before then being denied. Even though denied, it is now thinkable and, as such, can be debated. The government could even portray itself as accommodating a public interest by ‘allowing’ such debate. And before you know it the government is demanding what they claim the public wants. A case in point was the introduction of vaccine passports, as proposed by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Nadhim Zahawi. The existence of such a proposal was denied no fewer than 11 times by Zahawi before he finally opined, “it would be completely remiss and irresponsible” not to at least allow debate on how such passports might work in practice. Not long after that phoney debate we were all dutifully applying for such ‘passports’ in order to enter nightclubs and other events. There is no way of proving that Zahawi was dancing to the beat of behavioural scientists, but it is a fact that SAGE had its very own Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) to advise the government on how best to enable the introduction of such measures.
Also, one should keep in mind that those who seek to socially engineer are usually playing the long game. Vaccine passports have now been dropped in the UK, but the point is that the Covid-19 experience has primed the public for the next Deny, Debate, Demand sequence, this time to be applied in the furtherance of the longer-term objective: the proposed introduction of mandatory digital IDs. It’s a case of achieving a long-term goal through a deliberate strategy of two steps forward and one step back. That is what your behaviourist would advise. And I have to say, as an experiment in the effectiveness of the precepts of behavioural science in persuading us all to implement dangerous nonsense, the ground gained during the Covid-19 pandemic must have shocked even the most optimistic of behavioural scientists. Any strategy for manipulation that could get us all wearing a mask whilst walking to our restaurant tables before taking it off, only to put it back on again when going to the toilet, strikes me as potent beyond measure. And this matters because, even as I type, the same behavioural scientists are busily advising the UK government on the implementation of Net Zero.
The Behavioural Insight Team’s methodology (one might say, its manifesto) for nudging us all down the Net Zero road is detailed in their handbook, ‘How to build a Net Zero society: Using behavioural insights to decarbonise home energy, transport, food, and material consumption’. I could go through it in detail but I think the only point that needs making here is that it was written by people who are self-proclaimed experts in manipulation. Therefore one must expect the document itself to be a masterly demonstration of the nudger’s art. To illustrate this point I will focus upon a single sentence used by the group to introduce the document and to set the scene:
“Tackling climate change is not only a moral and legal obligation in the UK, but is also the growth opportunity of the 21st century, and is backed by huge public support.”
How much nudging can one possibly pack into a single sentence? This is not so much a sales pitch as a religious exhortation. Dare you be the one to flout moral authority? Do you really want to be the one to deny us all of the abundance of a promised land? Dare you stand up against the rest of society? The Behavioural Insights Team is not making a statement of fact here but offering a masterpiece of their art, employing just about every coercive trick in the book.
But I’m afraid the nudging is not just evident in the quasi-religious proselytising of a government agency’s handbook. The real-life consequences of such nudging surround us all and have already deeply penetrated our society. Every time your child comes home from school and asks why you are not doing more for the environment, you are being nudged. Every time you switch on the BBC’s Countryfile, you will be nudged. When your favourite soap opera runs with a climate change storyline, you are being nudged. Every fact-check is a nudge. Car adverts that exclusively promote EVs are nudging you. Emotive terms such as ‘denier’ and ‘global heating’ are nudges. Employing comedians to translate already simplistic science into skits designed for your average ignorant human is a case of nudge-nudge-wink-wink. All references to scientific consensus and protests of ‘false balance’ are designed to nudge out debate. And when your government sets up a website claiming that all their nudging is benign, don’t forget that they are nudging you. In fact, just about every vector for the promulgation of ideology has now been infiltrated by the merchants of nudge.
But amongst all of the manipulative trickery, perhaps the most impressive has been the portrayal of the suspicious sceptic as a conspiracy theorist. Boasting on their own websites that they are experts in manipulation and coercion, whilst simultaneously branding as conspiracy theorists those who suspect the manipulation to be taking place, has to be the behavioural scientists’ finest triumph, matched perhaps only by their success in convincing the public that only a cognitively challenged conspiracy theorist could possibly suspect them of such an achievement. Nudging us all into the idea that the greatest risk to democracy is a dark army of conspiracist misinformers, each with their nudge playbooks, is perhaps the greatest risk to democracy.
These government advisers are very good at what they do. They are very, very good. Underestimate them at your peril, and certainly don’t take your government’s good will for granted. We were all placed on this Earth to want something, and rest assured that there is much more at stake here than government improvement and the taxpayer’s money.
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