All the world's a nudge

And all the men and women merely cattle

“Britain’s increasingly ugly, bought and paid for tabloid media is ramping up its war against so-called ‘vaccine refuseniks’ and it’s starting to get really vicious and unpleasant,” writes James Delingpole (“MSM thugs ramp up war on vaccine refuseniks”).

Indeed it is.

The latest skirmish began in sensational style, with Andrew Neil casting aside the raiments of a Hayekian liberal to reveal a big state authoritarian double agent lurking beneath (“It’s time to punish Britain’s five million vaccine refuseniks,” Mail, 9 December). Karren Brady then clambered out onto the parapet, presumably in the hope of sapping morale over in the anti-vax trenches with a quick flash of her profile, only to trip on the wheelbarrow she’s recently taken to carrying her tits around in and inadvertently shoot both her feet off (“Make the unjabbed face their own lockdown so we can live our lives”, Sun, 11 December). Then, on 13 December, the allied libertarian resistance forces agreed to a temporary cessation of hostilities after an eagle-eyed Red Cross volunteer spotted a tired and emotional Carole Malone tottering unsteadily across no-man’s land, slurring incoherently and searching for the body of a career that’s been absent without leave for many years now (“The Unvaccinated DON’T get to live the lives the rest of us do” Express, 13 December).

The next day, of course, Parliament voted to support mandatory vaccine passports for entry into all civilian green zones, bringing de facto medical apartheid to our war-torn shores for the first time.

Let us just see, before proceeding, that we have these dates correctly:

• December 9 – Neil, A: excitedly firing blanks in support of vaccine passports.

• December 11 – Brady, K: leering lasciviously in support of vaccine passports.

• December 13 – Malone, C: happy to write whatever her editor wants her to write as long he’s able to wangle her a bed down at the shelter for the night.

• December 14 – Commons, House of: votes to support vaccine passports

Is it any wonder James Delingpole feels this campaign to demonise the “unvaxxed” was, as he put it, “co-ordinated”? Looking at what these zero-hours medizinische überwachungleiters wrote and – perhaps most importantly – how they wrote it, one wonders whether it might not have been heavily scripted too.

Consider the identikit anecdotes with which each article begins. True, the personal details differ a little bit from piece to piece but that shouldn’t blind us to the fact that they’re all stretched across the same, tripartite narratorial structure:

1. Author experiences and enjoys [X].

2. [X] requires [Y].

3. [Y] doesn’t impede the author’s enjoyment of [X].

It’s clever stuff – so clever, in fact, that earnest, bespectacled young postdocs over in the humanities have a name for it: captation (or captatio in the old rhetoric): the art of diverting your readers into a rhetorical valley wide enough to make them feel they can go wherever they like, but deep enough to ensure they’ll only ever end up going exactly where you want them to go… which, in this case, is step 3, above. Andrew Neil’s authoritarian variation on a Wagnerian leitmotif is included below [with my commentary italicised and placed in square brackets]:

Andrew Neil (Mail)

1. “Last night I took a friend out to dinner near my home in the South of France.” [Pleasurable event… at least… well, for Andrew at any rate]

2. “At the restaurant door we were politely asked for our vaccine passports, the QR codes on our smartphones were scanned and we were ushered to our table.” [Pleasurable event requiring a vaccine passport]

3. “The check had taken seconds – a very minor inconvenience when a new wave of the coronavirus pandemic is sweeping across the Continent.” [Vaccine passport causing little if any disruption to the pleasurable event]

Now compare Neil’s anecdote to those told by Karren Brady and Carole Malone in the opening paragraphs to their respective articles:

Karren Brady (Sun)

1. “I was in Italy for the Monza Grand Prix in September.” [Pleasurable event]

2. “It is impossible to be served in any café, restaurant or bar — or even enter some shops — without first proving you have been double vaccinated.” [Pleasurable event requiring a vaccine passport]

3. “It’s a fuss-free process that takes only seconds.” [Vaccine passport causing little if any disruption to the pleasurable event]

Carole Malone (Express)

1. “We spent last weekend in Copenhagen with friends – and it was a liberation. Not only is it the most beautiful city - everything works, the food is incredible and people are relaxed and smiley which could be to do with the fact that just 800,000 of them live there.” [Pleasurable event]

2. “But the most striking thing is the way the Danes are handling Covid. Yes, people were wearing masks in shops. But  everywhere else we went - restaurants , cafes, bars,  museums  - you just had to show your Covid pass…” [Pleasurable event requiring a vaccine passport]

3. “But the most striking thing is the way the Danes are handling Covid. Yes, people were wearing masks in shops. But  everywhere else we went - restaurants, cafes, bars,  museums  - you just had to show your Covid pass – and you were in.” [Vaccine passport causing little if any disruption to the pleasurable event]

No fuss apartheid! Stress-free stigmatisation! Blink and the fascism’s gone! Hurrah for the black shirts! And so on.

Three separate articles in three separate newspapers, all appearing within three or four days of one another and all addressing vaccine passports in exactly the same way, just as Parliament is getting ready to vote on whether those same passports should be introduced in England. It seems a little far-fetched to conclude that it’s all just one giant textual coincidence, don’t you think?

It’s probably worth noting at this juncture that well-known carbohydrate connoisseur and pre-cognitive equities trader, Piers Morgan, was also to be found regaling his 7.9 million Twitter followers with this exact same “personal anecdote” on 10 December – i.e. a day after Neil’s piece appeared in the Mail (daily circulation: 1.1 million), a day before Brady’s piece in the Sun (1.25 million) and three days before Malone’s cry for help over at the Express (240,000).

Piers Morgan (Twitter)

1. “When I was in NYC recently, restaurants/bars required…” [Pleasurable event]

2. “… vaccine status & masks to enter + mandatory masks in shops.” [Pleasurable event requiring a vaccine passport]

3. “It was a tiny inconvenience to keep the economy going.” [Vaccine passport causing little if any disruption to the pleasurable event]

No doubt there were others too.

We are of course all wearily familiar with what usually happens when there’s a spot of authoritarianism to be pushed along in the mainstream media. A cacophony erupts as all manner of appalling old waxworks are wheeled onto soapboxes to warble away with their own idiosyncratic little odes to whatever infringement of our civil liberties are currently being pushed by government apparatchiks. But that’s not what we’re looking at here, is it? It’s not so much a din as a professionally trained choir, all intoning the same monophonic Gregorian chant, all in perfect unison, and all at the same pitch, and all at the same tone, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever, get jabbed or get stabbed, build back better, my old man’s a Malthusian, air source heat pumps, Amen.

Much more likely than “coincidence,” then, is that somewhere upstream during the production of these articles, discussions were had with “experts” regarding how best to present vaccine passports to the British public so as to contrive at broad, in principle population-level agreement that they’re just what the country needs to wean itself off lockdowns. But what sort of experts would willingly aid and abet a co-ordinated attempt to covertly manipulate public opinion on a topic as controversial, indeed as un-British, as vaccine passports?

Turning to EAST: four simple ways to apply behavioural insights –  a recent publication by the government’s nudge pedlars over at the Behavioural Insights Team – we find a candidate answer to this question: behavioural psychologists.

“If you want to encourage a behaviour,” they suggest – as ever leaving us on tenterhooks as to whether they’re referring to sentient human beings or cattle – “make it [seem] easy… reduce the ‘hassle factor’ of taking up a service. The effort required to perform an action often puts people off.”

There it is: ease of use. The argument that each of our authors was so keen to make.

“Make it seem easy … reduce the ‘hassle factor’ of taking up a service…”

“When I was in NYC recently… it was a tiny inconvenience…”

“The effort required to perform an action often puts people off…”

“We spent last weekend in Copenhagen … show your Covid pass and you were in…”

Ease – or rather, the word “Easy” – is represented by the letter “E” in the Behavioural Insights Team’s “EAST framework.” EAST, by the way, is a tool they’ve designed to help “busy policymakers” design effective behavioural interventions. “The lesson that comes through strongest from the behavioural literature and our own work,” they explain therein, is that “small, seemingly irrelevant details that make a task more challenging or effortful… can make the difference between doing something and putting it off – sometimes indefinitely.” That’s why, if you want to design effective behavioural interventions, the Behavioural Insights team suggest you make it easy (E: e.g. “Reduce the ‘hassle factor’ of taking up a service”), attractive (A: e.g. “We’re more likely to do something that our attention is drawn towards”), social (S: e.g. “Show that most people perform the desired behaviour”) and timely (T: e.g. “Prompt people when they are likely to be most receptive”).

“Ease of use” isn’t the only part of the EAST framework that’s found its way into these three articles, either. Vaccine passports aren’t just “easy,” you see. Oh no. In fact, our three raconteurs-cum-life-coaches can’t wait to tell us just how “social” they are too. Apparently, there’re a lot of people out there who are happy to “perform the desired behaviour” … I’m so sorry, I meant: “use vaccine passports.”

To get at how this nudge was attempted, we first need to detour through the Behavioural Insight Team’s recent collaboration with Sky – The Power of TV: Nudging Viewers to Decarbonise their Lifestyles. It’s clear from this document that the Behavioural Insights Team regards the media as a key player when it comes to nudging people into adopting governmentally approved behaviours.

“We know people are more likely to engage with and act on information coming from credible messengers,” they point out therein. That’s why something they call social proof “highlights the power of role models, or the perceived majority, to convey to us that behaviours are normal, sensible, desirable, or expected of us [N.B. when behavioural psychologists write about “us” – as in, “all of us” – what they really mean is “you” – as in, “do as we say, povs”]. Seeing others adopt behaviours, or gaining insight into how to overcome barriers, can also give us the confidence to follow through” on certain behaviour changes. “There are even impacts,” they continue, “from ‘mere exposure’ to products and activities which can make us more likely to recognise and purchase a product or emulate the same behaviour.”

What is “social proof”, I hear you ask?

According to behavioural psychologists, it’s a moral pressure that causes us to follow the herd: if we look around and see that everyone’s performing activity [X] – I don’t know, just for the sake of argument let’s say an activity like [packing the cattle-trucks full of the disobedient, the recalcitrant and the stigmatised before sending them off to the gas chambers] – then apparently, we take that as “proof” that we too should be performing activity [X]. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, much of their work is devoted to artificially generating social proofs of this kind via “social norms messaging.”

Behavioural psychologists like social norms because once they’ve managed to associate them in peoples’ minds with “what-all-rightminded-people-do” they can use them to signal appropriate habits, setting up expectations or rules of behaviour within groups. Putting it bluntly, we might say that social norms messaging is to humans what cattle-prods are to cows that have strayed too far from the herd. It involves scaring, pressuring and/or psychologically bullying people who aren’t doing what they – as governmentally approved behavioural psychologists – regard as “the right thing” by society into re-joining the ranks of those who are doing “the right thing.”

According to a recent blog post by the London School of Economics (LSE), for instance, a form of social norm messaging that would provide useful “social proof” of the need for social distancing during a pandemic would be a statement like: “You are the only one of your friends who is not working from home”.

Crafty, aren’t they?

In one fell swoop they’ve isolated you from the norm-adhering majority, you naughty little lockdown sceptic, and they’re hoping that all the psychological pressure of isolation, of knowing that you’re the odd one out, will have you rushing back to the sweet, bovine, unthinking safety of the herd faster than you can say “Thank you, NHS.”  

The Behavioural Insights Team are never happier than when plying naïve, gullible (and well-funded) institutions with footling behavioural interventions of this kind. Recently, for instance, they’ve been putting it about that they helped HMRC increase tax payment rates from Self-Assessment tax debtors by sending out letters headed, “9 out of 10 people pay their tax bill on time.” In another project with the Co-op Legal Services, they designed telephone scripts that explained how many people liked to give money to charity in their wills, and subsequently claimed to have helped increase donation rates from 9% to 13%.

But have they also been advising daily national newspapers on how to give “the unvaccinated” social proof that their behaviour is deviant and thus in need of correction?

It looks a little bit that way.

Certainly Neil, Brady and Malone all seek to address the “problem” of the unvaccinated in suspiciously similar ways. Knowing what we know now, let’s look again at their articles, this time with an eye to how they’re establishing “social proof” that the behaviour of the unvaccinated minority is deviant.

Andrew Neil (Mail)

1. “There are still 5 million unvaccinated British adults who through fear, ignorance, irresponsibility or sheer stupidity refuse to be jabbed.” [Non-normative minority made visible and quantified – large enough to be believable, small enough in a country of 70 million people to make its members feel isolated]  

2. “In doing so they endanger not just themselves but the rest of us.” [Behaviour of minority putting majority at risk]

3. “If they contract Covid, it is they who will put the biggest strain on the NHS, denying the rest of us with serious non-Covid ailments the treatment that is our right. We are all paying a heavy price for this hard core of the unvaccinated.” [Behaviour of minority ruining the NHS and putting majority at risk]

He’s not really addressing the vaccinated here, is he? Or rather, he is – obviously – but his words have been structured so as to allow him to do something else too. Ignore the nastiness for a moment. Turn down the volume on the hatred and consider, instead, the functional significance of what you’re looking at. Because one of the things that’s getting set up here is a social proof for unvaccinated readers of the Mail; a proof that what they’re doing isn’t what the moral majority are doing. There’s “us”, the majority… and then there’s “them,” the deviant minority. The LSE’s “You are the only one of your friends who is not working from home” becomes Andrew Neil’s, “You are part of a tiny minority that isn’t protecting the NHS or helping save peoples’ lives.” The pathos of the LSE’s “Do you, dear employee, want to be the only person not working from home?!” becomes Andrew Neil’s “Do you, dear reader, want to be the person who ends up killing people and – worse! – destroying the NHS?”

We see this same three-stage social norms messaging taking place across the other articles too.

Carole Malone (Express)

1. “As for the 5m adults still refusing the jab…” [Non-normative minority made visible and quantified – large enough to be believable, small enough in a country of 70 million people to make its members feel isolated]  

2. “– they’re the reason we’re all at risk of restrictions.” [Behaviour of minority putting majority at risk]

3. “It’s these people who’ll put a strain on the NHS if they catch covid not the vaccinated who are unlikely to be hospitalised.” [Behaviour of minority ruining the NHS and putting majority at risk]

Karren Brady (Sun)

1. “An estimated five million people in the UK remain unvaccinated.”  [Non-normative minority made visible and quantified – large enough to be believable, small enough in a country of 70 million people to make its members feel isolated]  

2. “Despite the fact our lives, the economy and the mental health and wellbeing of a nation of children were in jeopardy as a result of several brutal lockdowns last year, some people still seem to prefer not to get the vaccine.” [Behaviour of minority putting majority at risk]

3. “It would be fine if it just affected them, but it doesn’t. In recent weeks some 39 per cent of Covid patients in hospital have not been vaccinated; a number that rises significantly within intensive care units …any unvaccinated Covid patient in hospital is taking up a bed they would not have needed had they been vaccinated.” [Behaviour of minority ruining the NHS and putting majority at risk]

Listen, I yield to no-one in my admiration for the cinematically gripping way in which Karren Brady sits behind that boardroom table on The Apprentice, staring vacantly into the middle-distance; the way we see her mental emptiness slowly deepen, leaving behind only the growing terror of nothing to think, nothing to say, nothing to contribute. The same goes for the other two: Carole Malone’s the sort of journalist who probably would have done very well if she’d taken up some other line of employment, and if you’re looking to write a PhD on the phenomenology of ennui, then all I can say is that attendance at one of Andrew Neil’s lectures on the work of Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek is as good a place to start as any.

But are we really supposed to believe that these three old gargoyles national treasures “just happened” to write these identikit pro-vaccine passport articles at the same time, and, whilst writing them, “just happened” to stumble upon specific forms of rhetorical and stylistic presentation that “just happened” to embody key behavioural psychological principles in relation to how best to encourage behaviour, where those principles also “just happened” to be the same as those the government’s Behavioural Insights Team have been pushing across the private, public and third sectors for many years now?  Or might we instead conclude that the government’s Behavioural Insights Team are now briefing national daily newspapers as to how best to nudge public opinion in favour of governmental legislation in the days leading up to crucial Parliamentary votes, just at that point when MPs might be taking the pulse of the nation through the national daily newspapers or via correspondence and surgeries with constituents who’ve also been reading the national daily newspapers?  

To piddle about tweaking this or that little form for HMRC or the Co-op Legal Services is one thing; but to covertly interfere with the output of what we used to call “the free press”? Well, that would take them, us, every citizen in the country, into different territory altogether.

If I’m right, and there’s funny business afoot here, then what might that tell us about the health of our political system? Where’s the line here between forms of “persuasion” that are necessary in any Parliamentary democracy and forms of “manipulation” that are anathema to it? Are democratic processes and procedures compatible with a media system in which governmentally endorsed ideas can be seeded into the public sphere prior to any overt national debate taking place? Should ostensibly personal contributions to ongoing national democratic debates written by celebrity messengers and addressing controversial legislative proposals like vaccine passports be published if they’re laced with covert techniques for manipulating citizens into agreeing that those proposals are wholly positive and should therefore be supported by all rightminded citizens? And as Toby Young and Laura Dodsworth have asked recently, if there’s an obligation imposed on broadcasters by Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code to maintain “due impartiality” across all their output, particularly when it comes to news and current affairs, then how do the Behavioural Insights Team see the media organisations they’re now working with meeting that obligation?

Still, in a world where the Prime Minister’s husband wants a “national conversation” about compulsory vaccination, the President of Dominion Voting Systems, Joe Biden, tells American citizens to keep their kids away from the unvaccinated, Austria extends its lockdown for the unvaccinated, the heirs to Mussolini over in Italy consider whether to ban the untermensch from workplaces, the World Economic Forum’s pretty little bunraku boy, Justin Trudeau, publicly complains about, “People who are so fiercely against vaccination, who don’t believe in science, they’re often misogynistic, also often racists,” and how, “It’s [this] small group that muscles in and we have to make a choice as a country, do we tolerate these people?”, and where the Preening Peacock of France, Emmanuel Macron, can casually remark that, “I am not about pissing off the French people [...] But as for the non-vaccinated, I really want to piss them off. And we will continue to do this, to the end. This is the strategy”: in a world like this, perhaps those of us still holding the line against blood-based systems of apartheid could try harnessing the Behavioural Insight Team’s EAST framework to the task of protecting liberal democracies from their neo-medievalist defilers.  

I only offer this up as a suggestion, by the way, because last week I was at the International Criminal Court in the Hague with a friend of mine. [Attention: “We’re more likely to do something that our attention is drawn towards”] Whilst there I was struck by the ease with which individuals could be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Putting a case together is a tiny inconvenience. [Easy: “Reduce the ‘hassle factor’ of taking up a service”]. You might even say it was fuss-free. According to the UN, it’s a crime against humanity to persecute an identifiable group or collectivity on political grounds as part of a widespread or systematic attack, and I guess the vast majority of us know a small minority … [Social: “Show that most people perform the desired behaviour] … who’ve been doing that recently, don’t we? [Timely:“Prompt people when they are likely to be most receptive”]. At any rate, 9 out of 10 of the unvaccinated say that they do. [Social: “We are embedded in a network of social relationships, and those we come into contact with shape our actions”]

But anyway, as I was saying, it’s really a very easy process. Apparently, any State Party to the Rome Statue can request the Office of the Prosecutor to carry out an investigation… just like that! Oh, and by the way: the UK, France, Canada, Italy and Austria are all State Parties – which makes putting a case together even easier. [Easy: “Reduce the ‘hassle factor’ of taking up a service”] In fact, the Prosecutor can even decide on his own initiative to open an investigation if the Office of the Prosecutor receives reliable information about crimes involving nationals of a State Party or of a State which has accepted the jurisdiction of the ICC, or about crimes committed in the territory of such a State and concludes that there is a reasonable basis to proceed with an investigation. In other words, in less than the time it’d take you to boil a kettle … [“Easy: Making the message clear often results in a significant increase in response rates to communications”] … you could be helping to save society. [Social: “Encourage people to make a commitment to others”] So why not join the hundreds of thousands who’ve already done so … [Social: “Show that most people perform the desired behaviour”] … and drop your local political representative or international legal expert an email today to get that judicial ball rolling. [Easy: “Reduce the ‘hassle factor’ of taking up a service”].