A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic, Laura Dodsworth [the two towers ebook .txt] 📗

if they always achieved that in their meetings. He threw me when he said, ‘Groupthink is a completely flawed concept, developed around the inherent pathology of the group that undermines rationality and critical thinking. That is not what is going on. Groups don’t have a tendency towards conformity, and I can absolutely guarantee you that groupthink is a myth.’ I told him I’d look this up.

Indeed, I checked with a couple of psychologists who were surprised at the idea that groupthink had been so confidently ‘debunked’. Naomi Murphy, clinical and forensic psychologist, told me that within the NHS, teams try and guard against groupthink as they are aware of the dangers. She made an additional interesting point that video calls will be affecting group dynamics in ways we can’t fully understand yet. These behavioural insight ‘war room’ meetings are not happening in a room, they are happening in disparate studies and sitting rooms around the country – how does that affect communication and consensus?

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) in the US published a report in 2018 entitled The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science.2 Sadly, I don’t think the UK government, civil service or the advising scientists appear to have read it. The NAS and the report’s authors are concerned with the use and abuse of statistics, irreproducibility of results and political groupthink in science, saying that the intersection between these issues is very much what is ‘wrong with modern science’. They summarise that ‘an entire academic discipline can succumb to groupthink, and create a professional consensus with a strong tendency to reinforce itself, reject results that question its foundations, and dismiss dissenters as troublemakers and cranks’ and that this ‘particularly affects those fields with obvious policy implications, such as social psychology and climate science.’ The problem is, the scientists in the midst of this don’t see it.

My video call with Stott ended swiftly after my next question, which was about the use of fear. I asked him what he thought of the ethics of fear being used to influence people. He said: ‘At the time it was about what might be necessary going into lockdown. We’d have been asked to consider what level of behavioural changes might be needed.’ I tried again, specifically querying the trade off in making people more frightened if it is ‘for the greater good’. He responded that it was ‘a reflection on people who might not think Covid will affect them.’ Again I probed, pointing out that statistically most people won’t be much affected, that Covid will not be serious or lethal for the majority – therefore is it acceptable on that basis to make people think they are more at risk than they are? He said, ‘There you go then,’ and our video call dropped from frosty to arctic and we wound up.

SPI-B’s remit does not involve questioning the data, the government-provided ‘facts’ that they work with, and Stott didn’t like my train of questioning. If your SPI-B advisor, or civil service behavioural psychologist thinks the country is facing the apocalypse to end all apocalypses (and presumably they were told to treat the Imperial College London modelling as de facto) then they might think the ends utterly justify the means. Although you would hope they would still be constrained by the ethics of their professional bodies and training.

Robert Dingwall, a Professor of Sociology who sits on various government advisory panels, was far more open on the subject of fear. In his view, fear ‘passed its sell-by date by the end of April’, although he took a nuanced view that ‘fear might have been an appropriate tool at the beginning when we thought the virus might be an existential threat.’

His concern was that since then, there had not been a wider debate about alternative strategies and that ‘the narrow base of advice given to the government was following a very narrow sub-set of science’. A struggle is happening within government between those who think the policies are disproportionate and the medics who have ‘colonised the expert panels’. While I have postulated in this book that aspects of our government resemble a technocracy, or a ‘psychocracy’, Dingwall worries that the upper echelons of government and advisors are leaning towards ‘iatrocracy’, a system whereby the doctors and scientists are in charge.

It is understandable for doctors and scientists to be dedicated to the pursuit of health, but Dingwall sees the problem as ‘a lack of challenge and diversity’. Ultimately he believes we ‘need to learn to live with Covid. We have never thought it necessary to inflict social distancing and mask-wearing for influenza even though that can carry off 50,000 people in a bad year. We live with the threat of infectious disease at a minor level every day.’

The anonymous scientific advisor deeply embedded in Whitehall I interviewed in Chapter 5, ‘The business of fear and the unelected psychocrats’, believes the ‘narrow base of advice’ Dingwall talked about has been deliberately cultivated for years: ‘There used to be rebels, and that was good, because you can learn from the rebels. Labour liked the rebels. During the coalition under Cameron, rebels became a little less popular. Then they disappeared.’ They think the teams of experts have been recruited for their unified approaches and in order to align with political intent. Once the panel is assembled, they ‘are given the injects as facts’. In the first instance in this epidemic it was that ‘500,000 would die’ and it was not their job to consider whether the facts were correct or not. Quite simply, questions are not welcomed. ‘You aren’t allowed to fight the information,’ they said.

The anonymous scientist characterised a homogeneity of thinking and groupthink among the SPI-B team: ‘SPI-B interpret dissent as bad. Rosa Parkes didn’t get off the bus. SPI-B would not have liked Rosa. The behavioural psychologists are arrogant and they have no rebellion in them.’

I certainly got a sense from all my interviewees (admittedly this is only through several conversations with several advisors) of common