How the government failed on behavioural science during the pandemic

Not listening to the behavioural scientists on SAGE and elsewere, led to the government acting too late, to undermining community and to sowing mistrust

In the Independent Sage briefing of 20th October 2023, Prof Steve Reicher, Prof Daisy Fancourt and Dr Rochelle Burgess gave a brilliant overview of how the government ignored behavioural science insights during 2020 and beyond. The consequences weren’t minor: they led to late interventions resulting in thousands more deaths, and they undermined community cohesion and increased mistrust, resulting in lower adherence to public health measures.

Steve summarised it very powerfully in this clip (54s): the public were one of the UK’s greatest assets during the pandemic and the government squandered that asset by sowing distrust and punishing instead of supporting people.

I found the session so important, that I’m going to use a series of clips from these experts to dig into two key aspects illustrating this failure - the myth of behavioural fatigue and the importance of trust & mistrust.

The myth of behavioural fatigue

The government cited “behavioural fatigue” as a reason to delay strong public health measures and lockdown in March 2020, the idea being that people would only put up with it for so long and so we shouldn’t start too early. Immediately, hundreds of behavioural scientists signed an open letter to the Government questioning the evidence behind behavioural fatigue as a reason for delaying measures.

In the clip below (1m 10s), Steve draws a straight line from delays in implementing lockdown for (an unevidenced) fear of fatigue to the tens of thousands of deaths estimated to have happened by delaying lockdown by a week or two. However, it is worth being clear that SAGE itself did not recommend lockdown measures until shortly before actual lockdown on 23rd March (a few days to maximum of a week). It is likely therefore that what the erroneous concept of behavioural fatigure did, was to delay serious consideration of lockdown as a policy option. We can’t know now whether a correct understanding of behavioural science would have changed the timing of lockdown.

In fact, as Daisy showed with her large social impacts study of the pandemic in the UK, the government were profoundly wrong in not trusting the public (clip below, 1m 4s). The evidence from Behavioural Science is that social solidarity, cooperation and altrustic behaviour increase during emergencies and disasters. Indeed, we saw 97% majority compliance with the rules during the first lockdown in the UK, and it remained above 80% throughout the pandemic until the rules were lifted.

The loss of trust

Daisy’s study showed that when people did not comply with measures, it typically wasn’t because they didn’t care, but for practical reasons such as financial need or caring responsibilties. For those that could and did comply, their reasons were altruistic: caring for others, social responsibility, shared identity and trust in the government.

Mistrust in the government started during the first lockdown - there were two key events that reduced trust (clip: 1m 30s). First was an announcement of easing lockdown when the public felt it was too soon, leading to losing trust that the government cared for our safety. Second was' Dominic Cummings’ trip across the country while he had Covid. Daisy’s team showed that the resultant loss of trust was strongly associated with reducing compliance with the rules.

The evidence was unequivocal that the more people had a sense of national community, the more they would adhere to measures, so treating people individually as a problem neglected the power of community and ignored the fact that when people don’t comply it’s often that they are not able to comply. Even worse, the strategy of blame undermined what we know to be effective by providing an excuse not to support people. Steve used this compelling example (56s) about Hancock refusing to provide adequate financial support during isolation, despite SAGE advising it would increase adherence, because he thought people would abuse it.

Trust needs to be placed in the context of our daily lives

Trust is also not uniform across the population. Rochelle powerfully spoke of the need to consider communities in the plural and that people are starting from different places - for good reasons - in terms of how much they trust the government to have their best interests at heart (clip below: 57s).

One example was in rule enforcement: communities that were over-policed before the pandemic were over-policed during it, having huge implications for trust in public health guidance (clip: 38s).

Rochelle ended by offering solutions: transferring ownership of communication and messaging from the outside to those already doing amazing work within communities, and trusting them to continue that work in the context of the new emergency (clip 1m 5s).

Conclusion

The overriding impression is of an opportunity missed at the cost of thousands of lives - an opportunity to capitalise on the enormous will to contribute, to be part of a social movement to support each other. Instead, the government did not trust us to do our part. Instead of enabling us to comply with measures, it meted out punishments and then sowed distrust when senior figures ignored the rules. I am left wondering how much of this distrust they had in us was rooted in the fact that so many of them had no intention of obeying the rules themselves.

If you want to learn more about these issues, please do watch the full briefing on YouTube.