The daily diet of statistics on deaths, hospitalisations and Covid cases has been so effective that compliance with lockdown has gone far beyond what ministers expected.
But the problem with fear, as one behavioural scientist said on Friday, is that "you can't turn it on and off like a tap".
As the country prepares for the complete end of lockdown in June, there are far-reaching questions about how many people will return to the workplace, or to normality, and the consequences of that for the economy and for physical and mental health.
Whether frightening the public was a deliberate - or honest - tactic has become the subject of intense debate, and dozens of psychologists have now accused ministers of using "covert psychological strategies" to manipulate the public's behaviour.
They believe the Government, acting on the advice of behavioural experts, has emphasised the threat from Covid without putting the risks in sufficient context, leaving the country in "a state of heightened anxiety".
They also claim that "inflated fear levels will be responsible for the 'collateral' deaths of many thousands of people with non-Covid illnesses" who are "too frightened to attend hospital".
They are so concerned that the British public has been the subject of a mass experiment in the use of strategies that operate "below their level of awareness" that they have made a formal complaint to their professional body, which will now rule on whether government advisers have been guilty of a breach of ethics.
The Government, and its advisers, deny any such transgression, arguing that they have simply presented the public with the facts about the threat Covid poses, and what they need to do to stay safe.
One of the key pieces of evidence cited by those who have complained about "covert" tactics comes from a document prepared for the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) at the beginning of the pandemic a year ago.
Dated March 22, the paper written by the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) stated: "A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened; it could be that they are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic group, although levels of concern may be rising ... the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging. To be effective this must also empower people by making clear the actions they can take to reduce the threat."
The same document presented a grid of 14 options for increasing compliance which included "use media to increase sense of personal threat", a tactic which was seen as having a "high" effectiveness though spill-over effects "could be negative".
Some Sage participants now admit to feeling "embarrassed" by such advice.
One regular Sage attendee said: "The British people have been subjected to an unevaluated psychological experiment without being told that is what's happening.
"All of this is about trying to steer behaviour in the direction an elite has decided, rather than deciding if it is the right thing or the ethical thing to do." ...<<<Read The Full Article Here>>>...
