The State’s Psychological Experts Are Distancing Themselves From Behavioural Science – Is Brainwashing No Longer in Vogue?

The government relied upon psychological experts in 2020 to advise strategies to deploy “non-consensual emotionally discomforting techniques” on the people of the UK which were more often than not in pursuit of their nefarious objectives. There has been a rising awareness of the techniques and strategies used that aimed to promote fear, shame and scapegoating to ensure mass compliance of damaging and ethically dubious interventions and who was responsible for them. Psychologists and behavioural scientists who are implicated as being significantly responsible for advising the strategies however, appear to be denying their involvement in such a process, according to Hart (source).

The state’s reliance on behavioural science strategies – ‘nudges’ – to facilitate the public’s compliance with covid restrictions has been widely documented. The many psychologists and behavioural scientists advising the government during the covid event (such as those in the SAGE subgroup, SPI-B, and the Behavioural Insight Team, BIT ) have, reasonably, been assumed to hold a significant degree of responsibility for using these methods of persuasion in communication campaigns.

Intriguingly, however, several prominent psychological specialists within these advisory groups have attempted to distance themselves from involvement in nudging, not only from the specific use of fear inflation but also – more recently – from being associated with all forms of this type of furtive persuasion. So what is the evidence that the state’s psychological experts are denying responsibility for the deployment of behavioural science strategies, and what could be motivating these claims?...<<<<Read More>>>...