The UK government’s Winter Plan is rife with nudges – to keep up the fear and… controls.
A newsletter by Laura Dodsworth
https://lauradodsworth.substack.com/p/winter
There’s a chill in the air. Not from the changing seasons, it’s still beautifully balmy, but because the behavioural scientists’ fingertips have traced a hoar frost of psychocratic nudge on the government’s “Autumn and Winter Plan”.
The UK government’s Winter Plan plan contained some welcome news. The most draconian schedules of the Coronavirus Act will be revoked, including the powers to close schools, allow potentially infectious people to be detained, and restrictions on gatherings and events. The language around the plan’s launch was thankfully more cool-headed. The times are “challenging” but it is no longer claimed that Covid is the “biggest threat this country has faced in peacetime history”.
But the plan is also rife with “nudges” – sneaky ways to prime, prepare and prod you into the desired mindset and course of action.
The contents are freighted with the sunk cost fallacy; we’ve come so far, we mustn’t allow our good work to be undone. This also taps into people’s innate sensitivity to loss.
The trigger from Plan A to Plan B will be “unsustainable pressure” on the NHS rather than deaths. It’s under serious pressure every winter so consider yourselves to be put on notice.
There are other indications of the inevitability of Plan B… READ MORE
See also Laura Dodsworth’s excellent book, A State of Fear. How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic, which she builds on in her newsletters, as above. ‘Nudges’, for example, she describes in detail in the book, as a technic familiar to behavioural psychologists for putting people in a ‘favourable’ state of mind to in turn accept the ‘next step’.
For a book review and more details, click here.
