How do you handle lightning?
What happens when your government threatens you with death
As a psychologist, I am ashamed by these acts of the Kings College team. The virus is a public health risk, with 2011 Plan public health solutions. We are not at war. As cognitive scientists, we have no external justification for violating our professional ethics by deliberately assisting harm to be done to innocents.
Give your grant money back. Repudiate your (rough and ready) work. Apologise to the British people for the suffering you have had a clear hand in causing. Go away and reinvent yourselves as caring professionals, invested in study of how to educate and inform people towards their better health.
The King’s College psychology hit-squad focused on this intriguing 2013 psychology paper:
Peters GJ, Ruiter RA, Kok G. Threatening communication: a critical re-analysis and a revised meta-analytic test of fear appeal theory. Health Psychol Rev. 2013 ;7(Suppl 1):S8‐S31. doi:10.1080/17437199.2012.703527
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3678850/
There’s an entire field in psychology: the dynamics of fear appeals. Yes, I know. We don’t get out much. Sorry.
There’s a library of literature on this. Going all the way back to Pavlov, his dogs and the sound of the bell. Reward v Fear. A classic subject of study. We do it in CBT. Although our focus of interest is helping people who are in fear, and messing up their lives because of it: guiding them out of fear, and into hope. Not (absurdly and unhelpfully) trying to threaten them into a better life.
The groundwork for Fear Appeals theory was done in the 1920’s by, you guessed it, the advertising men. What sold better: the reward of having a new car, or the fear of looking bad when compared to the neighbours? Trends have varied with the times. It’s not very woke to do fear: unless you’re having a go at Jordan Peterson. I’m sure my Kings College colleagues knew all this elementary stuff.
OK, so you want to zap terror lightning into people, to create your monster. What’s best to use as the wires, and at what voltage?
[They] postulate that behaviour change is the function of a perceived threat, but only when there is sufficient perceived efficacy.
A threat is a danger of harm, characterised by the degree of severity and the degree to which one is susceptible to this threat (and a threatening communication is a message conveying one or both of these elements).
Efficacy is one's ability to negate the harm, a function of the effectiveness of a potential response in negating the harm (response efficacy) and one's capability to enact that response (self-efficacy).
Both theories predict no behaviour change when a threat is not severe, one is not susceptible to it, there exists no effective response, or when one is incapable to execute an effective response.
When threat is increased but efficacy is low, defensive reactions are predicted, such as denying the severity of or susceptibility to a threat.
Thus, these theories predict that studies into threatening or fear-arousing persuasive messages (referred to as fear appeals in social psychology) should show an effect on behaviour only if both efficacy and threat are successfully manipulated;
Translation:
The best way of effectively threatening someone, is to give them a choice: (a) comply, and you avoid what’s threatened; or (b) disobey, and you get what’s coming.
but
If the person you are threatening, can’t do (a), or just doesn’t see (a) as an option, your threat won’t work. That’s low efficacy.
See also the discussion about Game Theory v Chaos theory, elsewhere in the book.
The Govt UK problem, as stated in the Kings College source article:
A somewhat worrying finding of this meta-analysis was that under low efficacy, the effect of threat was negative...
This is in line with the terror management health model (Goldenberg & Arndt, 2008), which suggests that threatening information can cause people to engage in health-defeating behaviour.
…that would render the use of threatening information very risky.
If an intervention developer is not very certain that either the population is high in response and self-efficacy, or that a given relevant intervention will manage to considerably increase response and self-efficacy, threatening communications should be avoided.
…This model postulates that activation of death-related cognitions triggers attempts to jettison these cognitions from consciousness: behaviour change to reduce the actual threat and/or defensive reactions to reduce the salience of the threatening cognitions. One possible defensive reaction is escaping self-awareness by engaging in health-defeating behaviour.
Kings College read this. We know, because it’s the only paper on fear appeals cited in their research paper. Let’s take this slow:
If you threaten people with Death:
they will try to push that threat out of their minds;
if they can’t achieve that, they may engage in health-defeating behaviour: harming themselves.
If you tell people that something is going to kill them, and they cannot get complete assurance that it won’t:
that threatening information can cause people to engage in health-defeating behaviour.
Unsurprisingly, a professional psychologist not being grant-funded by Govt UK to violate his professional ethics concludes:
that would render the use of threatening information very risky.
threatening communications should be avoided.
That clear enough for you: Kings College team and Ferguson?
A more recent 2017 study (did you read it, Kings College?) found (emphasis added):
Curr Dir Psychol Sci. 2017;26(2):126-131. doi: 10.1177/0963721416689563. Epub 2017 Apr 6.
Where Health and Death Intersect: Insights from a Terror Management Health Model.
When mortality concerns are conscious, people engage in healthy intentions and behaviour if efficacy and coping resources are present.
Translation: if you are terrorised into believing that you are going to die, no matter what you do: either (i) you won’t do what you are being told to do; or (ii) you will have a mental breakdown.
So, when you decided to formulate the Govt UK sponsored message, beamed out on the hour to the whole of your population: Anyone Can Get It: you knew the risks.
You knew that you were playing psychological Russian roulette with the minds of everyone in this country:
especially the young;
especially the old;
especially the less mentally robust.
In fact: everyone. Because only a very few people in any population have a death-wish. And those vulnerable persons prefer to do it on their terms: not yours. They sense it as the only power they have left in the world (see Chapter 6 I Want To Love But).
Your terror message is not being interpreted as “Stay at Home and You Will Never Get It”. No person of even the meanest intelligence could interpret Anyone Can Get It as meaning that.
Your deliberate, planned, and now hourly repeated, terror message means only one thing: One day, you will get it. Stay at home until you do. Save the NHS until it’s your turn.
Though the national media is not keen on reporting it: suicide calls are up 38% in 6 weeks. Domestic violence reports are up 32% in 6 weeks. Domestic child abuse is increasing. Terror is stalking every street and household in Britain.
And it cannot be made to go away now Boris, whatever you now say (explored further in the Coronaphobia Chapter). You’re just the Prime Minister. This viral threat is real. One day, you will get it. Nothing you say Boris, can magic away what is a viral certainty. You’ve saved me, for now, by keeping me locked away at home 23 hours a day. But one day, round some street corner or office, or blowing in through the window: the death which you foretold (again and again), is coming for me.
You stuck a Grim Reaper sticker on my terror-perspired sweatshirt. And it never comes off, no matter how often you wash your hands.
Boris and his ministers. Kings College and Ferguson. I hope that you are proud of what you have achieved with your campaign of terror. Ted Bundy was.
From: WORLDS ENDS: Coronavirus, Frankenstein and Other Monsters