Lessons From the UK's Lockdown: Discourse on Behavioural Science in Times of COVID-19

Abstract

In recent years behavioural science has quickly become embedded in national level governance. As the contributions of behavioural science to the UK's COVID-19 response policies in early 2020 became apparent, a debate emerged in the British media about its involvement. This served as a unique opportunity to capture public discourse and representation of behavioural science in a fast-track, high-stake context. We aimed at identifying elements which foster and detract from trust and credibility in emergent scientific contributions to policy making. With this in mind, in Study 1 we use corpus linguistics and network analysis to map the narrative around the key behavioural science actors and concepts which were discussed in the 647 news articles extracted from the 15 most read British newspapers over the 12-week period surrounding the first hard UK lockdown of 2020. We report and discuss (1) the salience of key concepts and actors as the debate unfolded, (2) quantified changes in the polarity of the sentiment expressed toward them and their policy application contexts, and (3) patterns of co-occurrence via network analyses. To establish public discourse surrounding identified themes, in Study 2 we investigate how salience and sentiment of key themes and relations to policy were discussed in original Twitter chatter (N = 2,187). In Study 3, we complement these findings with a qualitative analysis of the subset of news articles which contained the most extreme sentiments (N = 111), providing an in-depth perspective of sentiments and discourse developed around keywords, as either promoting or undermining their credibility in, and trust toward behaviourally informed policy. We discuss our findings in light of the integration of behavioural science in national policy making under emergency constraints.

Visualisation of image restoration for Indonesian public officials during the Covid-19 Pandemic

“…This study lends credence to contention that public officials have a strong preference for being close to individuals with political power to receive protection after committing errors. During the COVID-19 Pandemic, the documentation in the same photograph demonstrates the support of politically influential players for public officials who made false statements regarding COVID-19 (Chen et al, 2020;Sanders, Tosi, Obradovic, Miligi, & Delaney, 2021). Despite the significant prejudice in the ratings of some experts, public officials interpret the evaluations as evidence of their success.…”

British and Irish newspapers implicitly support single-use masks over reusable face coverings

“…In contrast, our results suggest that British and Irish newspapers prioritized informing the public about the protection provided by FM, especially during the early stage of the pandemic and enforcement of safety measures (April-May 2020). They have thus acted as an effective "platform" for health scientists (Knudsen, 2003;Olausson, 2009;Sanders et al, 2021), whilst being far less effective in considering environmental scientists' statements. However, this limited consideration in newspapers was probably caused by the lack of immediate availability of scientific clear-cut messages.…”

“…The topic of the Covid-19 pandemic has given rise to different representations of the crisis in newspapers. Focussing on the role of behavioral sciences during lockdown periods in the UK to support citizens suffering from the lack of social interactions, Sanders et al (2021) documented a positive impact of journalistic descriptions of the health crisis, which in effect permitted behavioral sciences to be embedded in British policy. Furthermore, journalistic discourse in the US influenced the population to stay at home (Xue and Xu, 2021).…”

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