Paton highlights the example of the Czech Republic, a country which, on 16 March 2020, locked down early and hard with border controls and the first national mask mandate in Europe. The early, strict lockdown in Czechia ‘did nothing to stop an autumn surge and second lockdown, then an even bigger December surge and yet another lockdown. Most recently, despite introducing even tougher restrictions at the end of January, Czechia experienced yet another big surge in cases throughout February and early March. As it stands, the Covid-related death rate in Czechia is the highest in the world (excluding the microstates of Gibraltar and San Marino) at 2,245 per million – 20% higher even than the UK.’
Voluntary behaviour change might impact transmission more than mandatory lockdowns. A first literature review: lockdowns only had a small effect on COVID-1920 from the Centre for Political Studies in Denmark found that ‘Studies which differentiate between the two types of behavioural change find that, on average, mandated behavioural changes accounts for only 9% (median: 0%) of the total effect on the growth of the pandemic stemming from behavioural changes. The remaining 91% (median: 100%) of the effect was due to voluntary behavioural changes. This is excluding the effect of curfew and face masks, which were not employed in all countries.’
Aside from a possible small effect attributable to mandated lockdowns and the further impact of voluntary behaviour change, what else affects the course of Covid? I would stray too far from the remit of my book and my armchair expertise to offer definitive conclusions, but having immersed myself in articles for the last year, hypotheses include: age of population, number of people in care homes, prevalence of obesity and other co-morbidities, number of nurses per capita, Vitamin D, previous exposure in the population to other coronaviruses, herd immunity, the volume of testing determining how many deaths are attributable to Covid, contact tracing, use of face masks and other NPIs. All of the uncertainties should remove the certainty that people place in one brute intervention.
Viruses cannot be turned on and off like a tap by governments. This is difficult for the politicians – the enactors of lockdowns – to admit. This is partly due to the sunk cost fallacy, whereby a decision with destructive consequences traps the decision-maker in a cognitive cul-de-sac – they can’t admit the mistake and they keep going. The same is true for governments around the world. Lockdowns don’t work, so they impose more. It is difficult for the opposition to admit as they called for harder, earlier and longer lockdowns. It is hard for the lockdown-cheerleading media to admit. If lockdowns hurt more than they helped, this is a painful truth for us all to admit. Yet it is a truth that must be acknowledged if we want to save ourselves another wave of unnecessary lockdown pain.
APPENDIX 3
FIGHT BACK AGAINST THE NUDGE
This is an excerpt from an essay by behavioural scientist Patrick Fagan.
There are three solid tactics that you can use to fight back against nudges.
1. UNCOVER
Firstly – forewarned is forearmed. There is evidence that education and training can mitigate the effects of cognitive biases. Research by Professor Carey Morewedge, in particular, has found that people can be ‘debiased’ by teaching them about a given nudge through interactions, games, or videos, making them less susceptible to it; Morewedge has demonstrated that this debiasing effect can apply to real-world decisions and can last at least two months.
In other words, understanding that your decisions are liable to be nudged, and being able to recognise these nudges in the wild, is key to psychological independence. Being aware, for example, that the government is using fear to manipulate you is the first step towards spotting and resisting that manipulation.
Additionally, behavioural science insights can be used to manage one’s own environment to reduce persuasibility. For example, one of the biggest psychological manipulators is conformity – that is, feeling pressured to follow and even believe the crowd in defiance of all reason – and research has discovered a number of mediators of this effect. Conformity is reduced, for example, when decisions are made in private; and so we can make an effort to make important decisions away from prying eyes to ensure a degree of rationality.
2. UNPLUG
However, although debiasing may be possible, there is also plenty of evidence that biases persist even if you are aware of them. It is a bit like an optical illusion: even though you may rationally know it is an illusion, your brain still cannot unsee it; likewise, even though you may know that Apple use tricks like scarcity and social proof to make their iPhones seem attractive, you still want one. As an experimental example, participants in one study were taught about a nudge called anchoring and adjustment, and they were told that it was about to be used on them – and yet their decisions were still biased by it.
This happens because much of our thinking and behaviour is influenced by external stimuli of which we have little-to-no awareness; messages take hold subconsciously. For example, product placements make people more likely to buy the brand even if they don’t consciously remember having seen it; similarly, priming research has consistently shown that subconscious or incidental exposure to symbols influences thinking (with, as just one example, people voting more conservatively when polling is held inside a church). Since these effects bypass conscious systems, it is difficult to think one’s way out of them.
As a result, messages still shape your mind and influence your behaviour, even if you view them critically. As Gustav Le Bon noted in his classic, The Crowd, persuasion occurs not through rational thought but through affirmation, repetition, and contagion. Do you think, for example, that anyone would watch an advert for Lynx body spray and rationally believe wearing it would cause buxom women to chase after them? And yet the subconscious associations are made, and behaviour is influenced. To
