{"id":1472994,"date":"2024-06-24T11:20:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-24T15:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/?p=1472994"},"modified":"2024-06-24T11:20:00","modified_gmt":"2024-06-24T15:20:00","slug":"uk-technocrats-sharpen-the-knives-of-manipulation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/uk-technocrats-sharpen-the-knives-of-manipulation\/1472994\/","title":{"rendered":"UK Technocrats Sharpen The Knives Of Manipulation"},"content":{"rendered":"

UK Technocrats Sharpen The Knives Of Manipulation<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Gary Sidley via The Brownstone Institute,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

My recently published research into the UK Government\u2019s deployment of behavioural science strategies \u2013 \u2018nudges<\/a>\u2019 \u2013 leads to a startling conclusion: in every sphere of daily life, our thoughts and actions are being psychologically manipulated so as to align them with what the state\u2019s technocrats have deemed to be in our best interests<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

It seems that open, transparent debate is no longer considered necessary.<\/strong><\/p>\n

How did my nation, a purported beacon of freedom and democracy, descend to such a position? While there have been multiple participants in this journey into behavioural science-fueled authoritarianism, a historical review of the key players indicates that American scholars have contributed in crucial ways to this trajectory.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Ubiquity of UK Behavioural Science<\/h2>\n

The research to which I refer sought to reveal the actors responsible for strategically frightening and shaming the British people during the Covid event. Focusing on the controversial \u2018Look them in the eyes\u2019 messaging campaign \u2013 involving a series of close-up\u00a0images<\/a>\u00a0of patients on the cusp of death and a voice-over saying, \u2018Look them in the eyes and tell them you are doing all you can to stop the spread of coronavirus<\/em>\u2019 \u2013 my critical analysis uncovered a series of disturbing findings in regard to the UK government\u2019s deployment of often-covert behavioural science strategies during times of \u2018crisis.\u2019 These revelations included:<\/p>\n

State-sponsored nudging is ubiquitous in the UK, seeping into almost every aspect of day-to-day life. Whether responding to a health challenge, using public transport, watching a TV drama, or interacting with the tax office, our minds are being psychologically manipulated by state-funded technocrats.<\/p>\n

The rapid expansion of UK behavioural science has not occurred by chance; it has been a strategic goal. For example, a 2018\u00a0document<\/a>\u00a0by Public Health England (the forerunner to the UK Health Security Agency) announced that \u2018The behavioural and social sciences are the future of public health,<\/em>\u2019 and one of their priority goals was to make the skills of these disciplines \u2018mainstream in all our organisations.<\/em>\u2019<\/p>\n

Throughout the Covid event, UK government communications \u2013 as guided by their behavioural science advisors \u2013 routinely resorted to fear inflation, shaming, and scapegoating (\u2018affect,\u2019 \u2018ego,\u2019 and \u2018normative pressure\u2019\u00a0nudges<\/a>) to lever compliance with restrictions and the subsequent vaccine rollout.<\/p>\n

The UK government\u2019s bar for legitimising the terrorising of its own people has been set incredibly low. For instance, one official\u00a0justification<\/a>\u00a0for inflicting further fear inflation onto an already scared population was that, in January 2021, the populace was not as frightened as at the start of the Covid event in March 2020: \u2018Fearful but much less panic this time around.<\/em>\u2019\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

As things currently stand, the UK Government can draw on several providers of behavioural science expertise to sharpen their official communications with the British public. In addition to the multiple nudgers embedded in transient pandemic advisory groups, since 2010 our policymakers have been guided by \u2018The world\u2019s first government institution dedicated to the application of behavioural science to policy:<\/em>\u2019 the\u00a0Behavioural Insight Team<\/a>\u00a0(BIT) \u2013 informally referred to as the \u2018Nudge Unit.\u2019<\/p>\n

Conceived in the Cabinet Office of the then Prime Minister David Cameron, and led by the prominent behavioural scientist Professor David Halpern, the BIT functioned as a blueprint for other nations, rapidly expanding into a \u2018social purpose company<\/em>\u2019 operating in many countries around the world (including the US). Further behavioural science input to the UK government is routinely provided by in-house departmental personnel \u2013 for instance,\u00a024<\/a>\u00a0nudgers in the UK Health Security Agency,\u00a054<\/a>\u00a0in the Tax Office, and\u00a06<\/a>\u00a0in the Department of Transport \u2013 and via the\u00a0Government Communication Service<\/a>, that comprises \u2018over 7,000 professional communicators<\/em>\u2019 and incorporates its own \u2018Behavioural Science Team\u2019 located in the Cabinet Office.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Early Contribution of US Scholars<\/h2>\n

How did the UK evolve into a nation saturated with state-funded behavioural scientists whose raison d\u2019etre is to facilitate the government\u2019s top-down control of its citizens? Two evolutionary strands that have led to the British administration drawing so heavily on the advice of behavioural scientists are the psychological paradigm of \u2018behaviourism\u2019 and the emergence of the discipline of \u2018behavioural economics.\u2019 And US scholars have played a leading role within each.<\/p>\n

In some respects, modern-day behavioural science can be construed as a derivative of the psychological school of behaviourism that gained prominence over a century ago with the work of American psychologist,\u00a0John B. Watson<\/a>. A rejection of the previously dominant introspectionist movement (whose focus was subjectivity and inner consciousness), Watson viewed the main goal of psychology to be the \u2018prediction and control of behaviour.\u2019 The paradigm of behaviourism concentrated exclusively on observables: the environmental stimuli that make a particular behaviour more or less likely, the overt behaviour itself, and the consequences of that behaviour (referred to as \u2018reinforcement\u2019 or \u2018punishment\u2019).<\/p>\n

The theoretical underpinnings of behaviourism comprise\u00a0classical conditioning\u00a0<\/em>(learning by association) and\u00a0operant conditioning\u00a0<\/em>(learning by consequence), all behaviour being assumed to derive from a combination of these two mechanisms. Subsequently, another American psychologist,\u00a0B.F. Skinner<\/a>, refined the approach; his \u2018radical behaviourism\u2019 resulting in strategic regulation of environmental stimuli and reinforcement being the prominent approach to the psychological treatment of phobias and other clinical problems throughout the 1960s and 1970s (albeit less so today). Elements of this pioneering work of Watson and Skinner can be observed in contemporary behavioural science, in its reliance on a range of strategies \u2013 nudges \u2013 to shape people\u2019s behaviour by strategically changing environmental triggers and the consequences of our actions.<\/p>\n

Another, perhaps more influential, historical influence on the nature of contemporary behavioural science arose from the academic discipline of economics. As detailed by\u00a0Jones et al (2013)<\/a>, in the 1940s the \u2018standard economic model\u2019 held the basic assumption that human beings were rational in their motivation and decision-making and that each could be relied upon to routinely make choices that advantaged their financial circumstances.<\/p>\n

This notion of rationality was first challenged by an American economist,\u00a0Herbert Simon<\/a>, in his assertion that the capacity of the human mind to make self-serving economic decisions was very limited. More specifically, Simon argued that human beings typically fail to utilise all the available information \u2013 a phenomenon he termed \u2018bounded rationality\u2019 \u2013 as well as favouring both short-term gratification over future planning and an unhelpful reliance upon arbitrarily established habits of behaviour. Importantly, Simon raised the spectre of these irrationalities being effectively countered within social organisations, thereby ultimately giving legitimacy to nation-state intervention in the decision-making processes of its citizens; the seed of the Governments-know-what\u2019s-best-for-us assumption was sown.<\/p>\n

Simon also legitimised the study of human irrationality as a focus of academic inquiry in its own right, thereby establishing common ground between the disciplines of economics and psychology. And, in subsequent decades, a succession of American social scientists took the baton and provided further elucidation of the nature of the biases that underpinned human decision-making.<\/p>\n

Tversky, Kahneman, Cialdini, Thaler, and Sunstein\u00a0\u00a0<\/h2>\n

In the 1970s, two prominent figures in the \u2018new behavioural economics<\/a>\u2019 movement were Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahnman, Israeli-born psychologists working in American universities. Their major contribution to this emerging field was to elucidate the\u00a0heuristics<\/a>\u00a0(shortcuts) that humans deploy when making snap judgements, one component of the flawed cognitive processing that underpins bounded rationality. One such imperfect rule of thumb is the \u2018representativeness heuristic\u2019 which may, for example, lead an observer to conclude that an introverted and tidy person is more likely to be a librarian than a salesman, when \u2013 given the relative prevalence of these two professions \u2013 the opposite is, statistically, far more likely.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the following decade, Robert Cialdini (a psychology professor at Arizona University) provided further insights into the automatic \u2013 \u2018fast brain\u2019 \u2013 workings of the human mind. Focusing on the methods of compliance professionals, Cialdini described how key features of a person\u2019s social environment can predictably trigger responses that are independent of deliberative thought or reflection.<\/p>\n

In his acclaimed book,\u00a0Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion<\/em><\/a>, (first published in 1984), he lists seven principles routinely deployed by sales personnel to encourage customers to buy. For instance, \u2018social proof\u2019 exploits the inherent human tendency to follow the crowd, to do what we believe most others are doing; informing a potential buyer that a particular item has been flying off the shelves will increase the likelihood of another sale. (The same strategy was deployed during the Covid event, with public health announcements such as \u2018the large majority of people are following the lockdown rules\u2019 and \u201890% of the adult population have already been vaccinated\u2019.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Cialdini\u2019s pioneering work encouraged a more generalised employment of these often-covert techniques of persuasion in both the private and public sectors. However, two other American scholars were centrally responsible for installing the tools of behavioural science into the political sphere of nation-states, including the UK.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2008, Richard Thaler (an economics professor) and Cass Sunstein (a law professor) \u2013 both based at the University of Chicago \u2013 wrote a book that facilitated the mainstreaming of behavioural science strategies. Influenced by the work of Tversky, Kahneman and Cialdini, the book \u2013\u00a0\u2018Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness<\/em><\/a>\u2019 \u2013 operationalised the use of nudges by state actors under the seductive banner of \u2018libertarian paternalism.\u2019<\/p>\n

The thrust of their argument was that behavioural science strategies could be used to mould the \u2018choice architecture\u2019 so as to make it more likely that people act in ways that enhance their long-term welfare, without resorting to coercion or the removal of options. One fundamental, and highly dubious, assumption underpinning this approach is that government officials and their expert advisors always know what is in the best interests of their citizens.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Although the concept of libertarian paternalism is an oxymoron, the construing of nudges in this way allowed the approach to achieve acceptability across the political spectrum, the \u2018libertarian\u2019 banner chiming with the right, the \u2018paternalism\u2019 banner with the left. Furthermore, Thaler proactively promoted state-funded behavioural science in the UK \u2013 for example, in 2008 he met with David Cameron (the then leader of the Conservative Party) and effectively became his unpaid advisor; it is no coincidence that, in the same year, future Prime Minister Cameron included Thaler and Sunstein\u2019s book as required reading for his political team during their summer vacation.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Labour \u2013 the UK\u2019s main left-of-centre political party \u2013 had been hatching their own plans for the deployment of behavioural science, with David Halpern (the chief of the current UK Behavioural Insight Team) a prominent figure. Thus, in the role of Chief Analyst in Labour\u2019s \u2018Cabinet Office Strategy Unit,\u2019 Halpern was the lead author of a 2004 document titled, \u2018Personal Responsibility and Changing Behaviour: The State of Knowledge and Its Implications for Public Policy.<\/em>\u2019<\/a>\u00a0In this publication, he provides a detailed review of the work of Tversky, Kahneman, Thaler, and Sunstein, and explores how knowledge of human heuristics and cognitive biases could be incorporated into the design of government policy. Throughout the first decade of the 21st\u00a0century, Halpern provided a useful conduit between the emergence of state-funded nudging in the UK and the behavioural science pioneers in the US.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This journey towards the present-day scenario of government\u2019s ubiquitous deployment of behavioural science accelerated with the release of the\u00a0MINDSPACE<\/a>\u00a0document in 2010. Co-authored by Halpern, this publication provided an explicit practical framework of how these methods of persuasion could be applied to public policy. From this point, behavioural science was construed as an essential component of UK government communications.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Aftermath\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/h2>\n

The influential work of the above-mentioned US scholars, together with a series of UK political leaders ideologically wedded to technocracy and top-down control of the populace, has had important consequences for British society. The tools of behavioural science are now embedded within the UK Government\u2019s communication infrastructure \u2013 alongside other\u00a0non-consensual methods of persuasion<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0propaganda<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 collectively constituting a potent armoury for manipulating the beliefs and behaviours of ordinary people. Currently, whenever the political elite choose to announce a \u2018crisis,\u2019 our leaders (aided and abetted by their chosen \u2018experts\u2019) are happy to covertly shape citizens\u2019 behaviour in line with their (often dubious) goals, routinely deploying methods that rely on fear, shame, and scapegoating.\u00a0<\/p>\n

My hope is that this brief overview of how the UK reached its current position of ubiquitous state-sponsored manipulation of the masses will help ordinary people to reflect on the appropriateness and acceptability of this form of government persuasion. Is the fact that humans can often act in irrational and (apparently) counterproductive ways sufficient justification for technocrats to strive to shape our day-to-day beliefs and behaviours so as to align them with what they believe to be the \u2018greater good?\u2019 Is it ethically sound for our political elite to strategically inflict emotional discomfort on the populace as a means of encouraging the populace to adhere to their diktats? Contemplation of these, and similar, questions by people residing in once-liberal democracies may lead to more visible dissent, with escalating numbers opting to reclaim their basic human right of deliberative decision-making. I certainly hope so.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nMon, 06\/24\/2024 – 07:20<\/span><\/p>\n

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