 Well, good evening everybody, thank you very much for coming along this evening. There are still people joining the talk, but I'm going to now start the meeting. My name is Pat Monahan, I'm the Society's President. I'm very pleased indeed this evening to be introducing Steve Reichert, who's going to talk to us about what the pandemic has told us about human nature. Steve is Professor of Psychology at the University of St Andrews. He's also Vice President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He works on social identities on group processes and many aspects of human behavior. During a pandemic, I'm sure many of you have heard him on the radio or television or whatever. He's been involved in numerous advisory groups for the UK government, also for the Scottish government. He's been a member of these SAGE committees, these scientific advisory groups for emergencies. He's been a member of an independent SAGE group that provides advice to numerous organizations, also to governments and to the public on how to minimize harm that is being caused by the pandemic. That's harm to individuals, to societies, and also how we might best recover from what, of course, as we all know, has been a very difficult time. Before I hand over to Steve, I'll just remind you of the format. Please don't put questions into the chat. Please put them into the Q&A. The chat is only for people who are reporting some kind of problem with the delivery of the talk tonight. Questions in the Q&A, you can put them in as we go along. When we get to the end of the formal part of the talk, we'll have a five-minute gap during which people then also have the opportunity to type in questions again. Then we'll go back to Steve and I will curate the questions and I will put your questions to Steve and he will then answer. As usual, we'll be aiming to be finished by nine o'clock or a little before. So Steve, I'll just hand over to you and we're looking forward to hearing what the pandemic has taught us about human nature. And thank you very much for coming along this evening. Well, thank you for inviting me. I mean, it's a real pleasure to talk to you. The one sadness is I'm not actually with you. Hopefully that will become possible in the not too distant future, but now we're all sitting in our studies and bedrooms and glaring into a screen. As you can probably hear, I'm on the tail end of a cold. So if you're finding the talk extremely boring, you can inject some incitement by betting on whether my voice will hold out to the very end. I will occasionally squeak, I'm afraid, as my voice comes and goes and I apologize for that, but hopefully I'll make it through. So yes, I'm going to talk about the pandemic and I'm going to talk about what it's taught us about human behavior and human nature. Many of you will remember the Commons report, which came out last week on the handling of the pandemic and in many ways it was a quite remarkable document, a quite corresponding document. It described the failure to take action early on in March last year as possibly one of the greatest public health failures we've ever had, certainly leading to many tens of thousands of avoidable deaths. It described the test and trace system into which we have sunk countless billions of pounds last time I looked it was 38 billion it's probably more than 50 billion by now, but it described it as chaotic. And it made the point that the preparation was woeful, we simply were not prepared for it in time and time again, the wrong decisions were made time and time again, the evidence was ignored. While the pandemic got worse, leading to situations where we had to take far more track traconian action than would have been necessary. If we'd acted earlier. But for all that for all those criticisms for all the fact it was corresponding there was one dimension one critical dimension and one of the dimensions I think in which the UK government certainly has made some of its most egregious errors. And that dimension was missing. And that dimension was the dimension of behavioral science. I did spend some time reading through the report. I then searched through it for the number of times particular terms came up the word behavioral only appears four times. There's only one instance where the behavioral is discussed in any detail but by and large, the behavioral science dimension the behavioral aspect of the pandemic is all but absent, which is surprising, because if there's one thing. It is the importance of the behavioral and behavioral analysis, not just at the individual level. Look at the societal level and at the policy level as well. Traditionally, when psychology is invoked in the media, it tends to be that rather light hearted and finally bit that they used to have at the end of the 10 o'clock news I remember, for instance, during the independence referendum I was asked by one media outlet to comment on the way in which the referendum made have led to divisions and arguments within families, which isn't an irrelevant phenomenon perhaps you had arguments, yourselves very much however, a peripheral argument to the core of the debate. And I probably wasn't as polite as I should have been I lost it at the journalist and say look for God's sake, why do you ask me about that when the central aspects of the referendum is issues of decision making under uncertainty issues of nationalism and national identity are at the very core of the debate. But the pandemic has taught us how important the behavioral is I used to say. Last year, that until a vaccine comes along, the only ways we have of dealing with a pandemic are behavioral, but I was of course wrong, because the vaccine achieves absolutely nothing. As long as the vaccine stays in bottles, and isn't in our arms. What protects us is getting vaccinated. So as we've discovered one of the key questions on the key behavioral questions is, well what what leads people to get vaccinated or not get vaccinated. What explains the fact that certain groups certain communities more marginalized and deprived communities are far less vaccinated than others so whereas, if you look at the figures not on vaccination but vaccine hesitancy. It's 20% overall it rises as high as 21% in black British populations. So the behavioral dimension is everywhere. And let me just give you two examples of that. I'm sure you're all used to seeing those graphs, those modelers graphs of the way the pandemic will go. And they tend to have three lines they tend to have a best case scenario, a middle range scenario and a worst case scenario. Those scenarios basically vary from kind of all right to close to Armageddon. So the key question the really interesting question is what are the parameters which determine whether we get the right line or the Armageddon line. And the answer is nearly always behavioral factors are critical they're not the only factors of course they're not. But they are critical and in particular, there are two factors which stand out. One is the number of contacts we have with others on a daily and weekly basis. Because of course if you look at the R-rate how many people we will infect that will be critically dependent on how many people we mix with. So the R-rate is something about the nature of the virus of course it is and the Delta variant as we know is more transmissible. And it's also critically about how much we mix with others. Now, there's a study that's been going on weekly all the way through the pandemic called the Comix study. And it simply looks at how many contacts people have per day before the pandemic. It stood at about 11 or 12 different people we see each day. That was the mean at the height of the pandemic. And without the height of restrictions when we were all largely at home it fell to about three people today. And now it's creeping up to four and to five but it's still less than half of what it was before the pandemic. So if we reverted to the forms of socializing we had before the pandemic then actually the R-rate would double and we would be in that bad news line leading up towards Armageddon. Or a second factor. A second factor I asked one of the modellers at one of the meetings precisely this question and she replied, well, it's how much people self isolate when they are infected. And this is the whole point of nearly everything that we were doing testing and tracing and finding contacts was to get people to self isolate if people don't self isolate all that energy those 50 billion pounds are completely squandered. So whether we isolate that behavioral issue becomes completely central. So if people do self isolate. Again, you're on the, you know, you're on the line to relatively good news and if people don't self isolate, you'll get again on that route to petition on that road, that line to Armageddon. So those behavioral factors are absolutely critical in terms of the variability deciding what the outcome should be. And the fear really does matter. And one of the pleasures if there have been any pleasures during this pandemic has been the way in which social scientists and historians have sat together with the epidemiologists and the virologists and the modellers. And we've used our understandings together. And hopefully that that breakdown of the two cultures the death of CP snow might be one of the. Things that come back when we build back better as the slogan goes. So that's my first point the first point I want to make it's very simple point. But I think it's a very important point and I think it has profound implications for the way we think about policy and the way we devise policy and the way we give advice and also profound implications for understanding of psychology. And it should be part of the social sciences which is as important to understanding society and policy as anything else that understanding of, as I say, the systemic and the societal implications of behavioral science. The second point I want to make however, and it's equally important is that behavior is not all about psychology. It's not all about psychology. Well, no better than I, the way in which empires tend to die is through hubris, reaching too far, extending their boundaries to places where they get burnt. And in fact, I think it becomes highly problematic and highly political to put things down to behavior alone, I'm sorry to put behavior down to psychology alone. Let me give you a couple of examples. This is the pandemic research show that people from deprived communities and ethnic minority communities were three to six times more likely to break lockdown and mix with others outside the home. But when you do their motivation, what they wanted to do. There's no difference at all. The difference in their behavior in their mixing and as I've already described mixing the number of contacts we have is critical to pandemic was almost entirely down to opportunity to issues of resource the ability to stay at home and put food on the table and all deprived you were the more likely it was that you were had to go out to work. And this was a telling contrast. If you remember about a year ago last autumn there was a spike in infections among students and young people. There were two very different approaches to that. Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Matt Hancock blamed it on individuals and individual choices and they urged people, young people not to kill their crap their grannies as if they'd chosen to party. They chose them to go to raves, and they didn't care about others. Well, a surgeon took a very different position. She pointed out and she was quite right in this that young people are more likely to live in multi occupancy houses where they can infect each other, if they get infected. That secondly they are more likely to work in public facing jobs where they come into contact with others. And thirdly, that they are more likely to travel by public transport, where again they get more infected so this was not a matter of psychology of will. The headlines about raves and about parties yes they were some but they were insignificant compared to the fact that people found themselves in conditions where they didn't have the opportunity to avoid mixing. Or again I said earlier about the figures on how many contacts we have and about how they're creeping up for three to four to five. And when we think about mixing, quite often again the images, the headlines, the media focus is on people choosing to party, people choosing to have contacts but actually when you look at the evidence it shows us that the increase in mixing is almost entirely to do with the fact that people are going back to work because they have to go to back to work and not because they are choosing to socialize more. And so by focusing on the individual and the individual psychology to explain behavior, what you do is that you ignore the systemic factors and the systemic inequalities and the pressures on people which give them no choice but to go out. And after all when the UK Prime Minister when Boris Johnson was blaming people for mixing more and for rising infections. Actually he was telling them at the same time they had to go back to work, and then they would lose their jobs if they didn't go back to work. So let's take the other factor. I spoke of two factors that were critical in the pandemic. I spoke about mixing, and I spoke about self isolating. And now I'm arguing that mixing, of course there's a motivational component, but a lot of the variability levels of mixing have got nothing to do with the motivational with the psychological and everything to do with opportunities. With the social position you find yourself in but let's look at self isolation. Again, if you look at adherence data through the pandemic actually is remarkably high. Again, media focused on the violations there's there's, you know, there's a good news story with people having a party. There's no news story at all of people quietly staying at home and doing nothing I, at one point on the today program argued they should have far more stories of the dull mundane reality and heroic reality of people staying at home and and and not going out. But of course, as I say that's not as newsworthy as a headline splash about covidiots at a rave, but by and large, the story is actually rather different. The story actually is one of remarkably high levels of adherence not come back to this. There was one study early on where people were doubting, and again I'll discuss this in a moment, doubting people's ability to put up with restrictions which shows that over 90% of people were adhering to lockdown even though of those 46% were suffering quite badly, not only materially but psychologically as well, but people were still adhering. But the one exception, one clear exception was in the area of self isolation. Self isolation figures, they differ according to methods but they probably weren't much higher than 25%. They were certainly below 50% of people who were infected who systematically self isolated. So why didn't they self isolate. After all this is such a critical parameter. And the answer again is straightforward. It wasn't to do with motivation it was to do with practicality. It was the ability to stay at home and survive financial. It was the ability to isolate yourself. If you live in a multi occupancy house or multi generational house with with parents and grandparents living there as well. It's the difficulty of self isolating if you've got caring responsibility inside or outside the home it's the problems of getting the food delivered it's the problems of getting the dog walks and so on. It's all those practical issues. Because of those practical issues of course more deprived groups were less likely to self isolate and indeed less likely even to get tested. They came out of the early mass testing work in Liverpool and they got were less likely to get tested not because they didn't care, because they couldn't afford to find out that they were positive. Because if they were positive they would have to self isolate, they couldn't afford to do it. So my second point. And again I think it's a point of great simplicity but fundamental importance is that behavior is critical. I think there isn't all about psychology one of the early points we try to make in the advisory groups is one of the role of psychologists is to say when it's not about psychology. It's about to do the opposite of hubris. It's about defining clearly our limits, because again there is a politics to individualizing things. There is a politics to saying, it's about the individual, because you speak they take the spotlight learning away from those systemic factors, which influence what people are able to do and show the role of inequalities in this pandemic which are so central. But now I want to come on to the third factor. In a few days it's the factor I want to dwell on most and is most central to my arguments about what the pandemic tells us about human behavior. Yes, about its importance. Yes, about the fact that it's not all about psychology. But that's not to say it's not about psychology at all. Psychology is important. Psychology is critical. The motivation to add here is a key factor. The motivation is that if psychology is important, then it's equally important to get the right psychology, because if you get the wrong psychology, you're going to make very severe mistakes. I want to argue that that is precisely what has happened. And that's one of the factors, which certainly to UK level has been central to understanding the problems we've had during the pandemic. So let me go back to what I was saying before about that Commons report. And I mentioned that it didn't really touch on the behavioral, but there was one exception. It spends one page one out of its 131 pages but still spends one page looking at the notion of behavioral fatigue and its role in delaying the lockdown. I know they say a week is a long time in politics, a year and a half feels like a lifetime in a pandemic. And so going back to March 2020 feels like going back to a different life in a different world. But I'm sure you can all remember the arguments that went on with said, well, look, people won't be able to put up with restrictions. People don't have the ability to deal with hard times. And therefore, if you put in restrictions too early, they'll wane too early, so we need to wait. We need to put back the point at which we impose restrictions because we are limited by the frailty of the human psyche that human beings are psychologically weak and strong policies will be beyond. And because of that, in that crucial week of the 13th to 20th of March 2020, we delayed taking action. We delayed restrictions. And again, as I said earlier, that probably was one of the greatest mistakes that could be made and probably tens of thousands of people paid for that mistake with their lives. Now, the first point I want to make is that there's a lot of uncertainty still where that notion of behavioral fatigue came from. Many people thought it came from the so-called nudge unit, the behavioral insights team in 10 Downing Street, they deny it. Certainly it was articulated by Chris Whitty, who, according to some accounts, took it as common sense from his knowledge as a doctor that people don't take drugs and therefore how can you expect them to observe severe restrictions. There was a letter by about 600 behavioral scientists saying, look, we don't recognize this concept. And equally, the government's own advisory group on behavioral science by be indicated a huge problem with the issue and a number of members of spy be wrote papers, making the point that the notion of behavioral fatigue is not a psychological notion. Levels of adherence can wane during pandemics, but that happens for all sorts of reasons, not necessarily the weakness of individual willpower. Nonetheless, the idea got traction and the idea had consequences. And even if the idea didn't come from the behavioral insights team at 10 Downing Street, it does articulate with a wider view of human psychology in government. The reason why I became involved with spy be is that my work over the years has looked at various aspects of human behavior and crowd behavior, collective behavior is one of those issues and I've done work on how people behave in emergencies. And so I've sat on a number of committees looking at planning for emergencies, what should we do, how should we communicate. And it's clear that there's a very strong view in government that people on their own are incapable of dealing with a crisis. And that they need government to look after them there's a paternalism there it's not particularly a party political paternalism. It basically is a justification of governance. If the people can't look after themselves, they need government to laugh them and if they can laugh themselves, who needs government, which is not a question that people in government like to ask themselves very much. So, there is a buy in to a notion of the human being as, if you like, what I sometimes call a fragile rationalist, we are beings who have problems with reasoning that we can't deal with complexity and we can't deal with uncertainty. And particularly in a crisis where pressure is put on us, then we crack we panic, we act irrationally we act suboptimally, we act without resilience. We are lacking not only in reasoning, we are also lacking in willpower and lacking in morality it's a little bit like the classic Hollywood scene of a disaster movie, where you are bound to see at some point or another. People running screaming, waving their hands in the air towards the the exits, trampling over others blocking the exits turning a crisis into a tragedy that's a popular representation but it does fit with that notion of the human subject as, as I say, individually fragile as an inadequate reason. And the interesting thing is that even as that Commons report critique that view, it called it group think, and group think is a view in psychology about the ways in which groups of people act suboptimally and irrationally and don't accept information. So even the critique of this notion of individuals as fragile and undermined, cognitively undermined by the group and by a crisis was not only there in the original, but was reproduced in the critique of the original. It's very strong view, very strong view that, you know, individuals at the best of times are limited, but groups really subvert us groups really undermine our capabilities. It's an anti-collectivism, which has existed, not only in psychology, but particularly in psychology, since the dawn of industrialization and the formation of a mass society in the 19th century. But is that accurate? What does the evidence show when you actually look at disasters and emergencies? The 911 is, of course, one of the greatest most iconic disasters of recent times, not because of deaths have been far more deaths, saying the Chinese earthquake of 2008. But because of the American hegemony because it happened in the media center of the world because it was filmed live. It became quite iconic. And when we think of 911, one of the things that we think about is the extraordinary courage of the firefighters who ran in and up the stairs of the Twin Towers. Quite remarkable courage when so many were at danger of death and so many actually died. But the interesting question is, how much good did it do? Because they went in expecting to find people in panic and chaos and to organize them and help them escape. And what they found was people self-organizing themselves to get down the stairs and to get out. And we did similar work. We did work around the 2005 bombings in London. And if you remember, one of the bombs was on an underground train. The train was stranded in London in one of the tunnels. And the emergency services again with huge courage went towards it. And to their amazement, what they found was not people in chaos, not people incapable, but actually people helping each other, doing elementary triage, supporting each other. You didn't find panic. And time and again, when you study disasters and crises, panic is actually very rare. What you tend to find is solidarity. People support each other. They help each other. They stay behind. If they die, it's not trampling over others to get out. It's often staying behind to comfort and be with others because they don't want to leave if others are there. What you find isn't panic. It's solidarity. And by now there is a wealth of research which makes the similar point. And again, as I've pointed out, what happened in the pandemic wasn't about people falling apart. It wasn't about people being incapable of putting up with restrictions. In fact, for me, one of the emblematic moments for me of the whole pandemic, and some of you might have seen this, it was Channel 4 News on the evening that Dominic Cummings had given his rose garden press conference. And if you remember, the narrative there was, well, it was quite understandable, any father would have done this. And after they showed Dominic Cummings, they showed a young girl, a young black girl from a single parent family. And the mother had COVID, and she was so ill, she couldn't go after the four-year-old daughter. So this nine-year-old child was looking after the four-year-old, feeding her with watered-down baked beans because that's all they could afford. Until they weren't breaking lockdown, they were going along with restrictions because they felt it was necessary for the good of the community. Incredible resilience. What happened in the pandemic surprised many people. So they tried to explain it in terms of an exceptionalism, a British exceptionalism, the Blitz spirit. But the interesting thing is, nearly always when you find disasters in different parts of the world, you find this solidarity. So where does this solidarity come from? What is the basis of it? Andrew Cuomo, now disgraced, but then governor of New York, actually put it very nicely. He was at some point heckled by people saying, you know, why should I wear a mask? Why should I have to do this? Why should I have to do that? And he said, look, this isn't about I. It's about we. Because your behavior impacts upon others, whether they get infected, whether they live and die. He said, get your head around the we concept now in slightly more technical terms as social psychologists. When we look at the notion of identity, who am I? We argue that identity is not a single thing. It's not a sovereign concept which defines the individual. It's actually a variable, a construct that can be defined at different levels in different ways at different times. Sometimes I do indeed think of myself as I versus you in terms of my individual identity. But very often, if you ask me who I am, or if I were to ask any of you who you are, you would tell me I'm a philosopher. I'm Scottish. I'm a woman. I'm a nationalist. Whatever you tell me about your group memberships, which are just as important to you. They are things you feel just as passionately about. They're not secondary identities. They're just as primary. So that notion of social identity, that notion of thinking in terms of we, that the self encompasses others. And when you talk about self interest, you're not talking about the interest of the I self, but the interest of the we self. And that formation of a sense of social identity, of we-ness, means that other people aren't, if you like, psychologically or socially other to you. They are part of the extended self, but their fate is your fate. Their concerns are your concerns. And so when we form a sense of shared identity, we begin to have greater empathy for others. We also begin to see behavioral effects. For instance, we are far more likely to help in-group members than out-group members. And when we extend our notion of self, so we're more likely to help more people who are included in that self. And the point about disasters and crises is that common experience, that common fate, that common fear, that common imagined future creates a shared identity. And shared identity creates that sense of solidarity. And knowing that we will be supportive of others makes us feel we're not alone, that we can cope, we can get through these things. It creates resilience. Some of you might know Harlow's work on child development, very controversial because of some deeply troubling studies he did with monkeys. But he came out with a really interesting concept of the socially secure base. A child who is well attached to the family and has a sense that they can go out into society because they know they'll be looked after if they fall. Well, in a sense of social identity is a socially secure base. If you feel part of a group, then you can go out into society knowing you can ask for support from others. And it happens in mundane ways. You know, those winters we've had recently where we're all snowed in, that sense of common experience, that sort of sense of connection to your neighbor, those forms of solidarity that you don't see at other times, like helping dig out each other's cars. That sense of shared identity is absolutely critical. What that tells us is not only were the government wrong about resilience, they were wrong because they had a wrong understanding of the nature of the human subject. Because they thought of the human subject in individualistic and purely cognitivistic terms. And what we saw was equally important were relationships and the nature of our relationships to others, and that resilience isn't something that is in us a quality that some have and others don't have. It's something that happens between us. And that understanding of the critical nature of identities and relationships, I think comes out in a whole series of ways in the pandemic. It comes out, for instance, in the formation of mutual aid groups. It was estimated that some 12 or 13 million people were involved in such groups, there are about 4,000 of them up and down the country. They were the tip of the iceberg. I suspect many of you were involved in WhatsApp groups, Facebook groups in your street or your community or whatever, a vast increase. So the evidence suggests that people gained a greater sense of community, a greater sense of belonging of coming together. It was fractured in various ways it wasn't perfect, but it was really important. So that sense of relationship was critical to those forms of solidarity and to the delivery of services that the state can never provide the level that was required. So if you needed people to deliver food for a neighbor or whatever, there aren't enough civil servants to do that, but through local networks and solidarity networks, it can be achieved. So that was one critical aspect of the pandemic. Interestingly enough, it was also absolutely critical to well-being. There is by now, and I don't have time to go into it in any detail, a really fascinating literature called the Social Sure Literature, which shows that a sense of belonging to a social group, not actual banks, networks with individuals, but just a sense of belonging to groups is powerful in terms of mental or physical health. Just to give you one of the whole swath of examples, if on retirement, I don't know if that's relevant to any of you, but if on retirement, you lose two social group memberships, your work group membership, perhaps something you do around work. Your likelihood of dying within the next two years is 16%. If you gain two new group memberships, you join a couple of clubs, societies get involved in things with others, your chances of dying in the next two years are 0.5% a factor of over 30. And again, in this pandemic, one of the problems, I think one of the big mistakes we made is we talked about social distancing. What we wanted to do was to physically distance, because being physically close could kill, but remain socially connected. So we saw the importance of social relations of belonging to groups, feeling a part of a group for mental health. And it was also important, and I think this is critical, for adherence in two ways. If you did a cost benefit analysis of staying in or going out, and imagine that you're young and you're healthy. Well, if you think of yourself in terms of I, then the cost of going out is relatively low, even if you get infected, not much is likely to happen to you, but the cost of staying at home is of course great. You don't want to stay at home. I have a 17 year old in the other room. He doesn't want to stay at home. I suspect if you have 17 year olds, you will know the same thing. So, if you define the self of interest at an individual level, then your calculation is it makes sense to go out rather than stay at home. It undermines that. But if you think of yourself in collective terms, if you think of yourself in terms of I as a member of community, of course, the calculation changes fundamentally because if you go out, you might kill a member of the community, fundamentally harm the group. So that calculation, your reasoning depends upon your definition of of self and there's very good evidence to show this is study just published for instance, which was in 65 nations over 50,000 participants show that one of the key factors in adherence. What's the individual interest it was a sense of connection to the national community, not nationalism as in my country right or wrong but nationalism in that I am concerned about others in my national community. So we begin to see how important this sense of group identity, the nature of relationships is to to the way we behave. And there's another example of that. And one of the debates there's been really important debate about those who who don't get vaccinated. And a lot of the discourse has been that these people are either stupid or they're selfish. And that of course becomes problematic when you look at the group differences in vaccinations I spoke to it, it leads to racist notions of our well these groups are a little bit more backward they don't understand modern scientific notions or or they're selfish they're not as sociable as we are. Now, the person like vaccination is that very few of us are epidemiologists or biologists who actually know what's going on with the vaccine. We get information from others. And the key issue is, whose information can we trust. Is it true that the vaccine is safe. Can I trust that it's good for me, so on. So the issue isn't about, you know, an epistemic ability to deal with the information is about your social relationship to the source of that information, and therefore whether you trust it or not. That's why groups, which have a history of mistrust, actually have good reason to believe that the medical interventions aren't always in their own good. So, amongst the black community for instance people will take, tell you about the, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment which was an appallingly immoral experiment, which used black participants to to experiment on on on various syphilis treatments, or the misuse of vaccination around various diseases say in Nigeria in communities of historical low trust. Then people are more likely to be convinced by narratives, which say to them, well, are you sure the vaccine is about doing things for you, or is it about controlling you. The issue here then is not to castigate people for being stupid, or simply think of giving them more information is important. The key thing you need to deal with is the issue of the social relationship of trust. And here, in a sense is my almost final point because I'm aware of time going on. Now that is that the problem is that the dominant view of the subject as irrational and incapable leads you to treat people in ways that undermine trust. So, trust is of course is a reciprocal thing to get trust you need to treat people with trust. But if you consider that people are psychologically weak and psychologically incapable. If you believe that people and the public are the problem, then you're going to act towards that with them in ways that undermine trust, undermine a sense of partnership. First of all, you're not going to give them information. You're not going to trust them with bad news for fear that they might panic. You're going to limit yourself to relentless boosterism. You're not going to admit to mistakes for fear that they might, they want a paternal authority and admitting to mistakes might undermine that. You're going to blame them for things going wrong. You're going to threaten them with punishment. I mean, there are a whole panoply of things that I could probably spend another hour looking at all the various decisions, which basically were rooted in this psychological view of individuals as frail, treated people as a problem and treated people as other. There was a very nice piece just the other day in nature, which made this place from Denmark and trusting what was happening in Denmark and what was happening in England, Denmark being a very high trust society. And it concluded with the point that if you want people to trust you, you must dare to trust them. You must trust them with difficult information. You must admit to frailties only in that way. Are you going to get that trust reciprocated? So the danger is not only that the government had the role view of behavioral science, but that in many ways that led it to act in ways that undermined the things that are important, that by not taking the issue of social relationships and building relationships of trust seriously, it acted in ways that atrophied and undermined those relationships of trust. So let me conclude that after having spoken for far too long. I apologize for that. At least my voice has kept going. What have we learned? What have we learned about behavior? And what have we learned about ourselves as human subjects? Well, as I say, I think we've learned something about the importance of the behavioral at a societal level and the need to include behavioral science at the core when we deal with societal problems. COP26, as you all know, coming to Glasgow in a couple of weeks and I will be Glasgow for those two weeks studying the crowd dynamics. The issue of dealing with the climate crisis, of course, is not just a technological one. It's not just a scientific one of understanding the impact of emissions on global warming. It's also about changing mindsets. It's also about changing behavior, not just individual consumption, but individuals making demands upon governments to change things systemically. So I hope that we will maintain the understanding of the critical importance of the behavioral. And I hope also we will recognize that if you want to get people to behave in particular ways, making it possible for them is really important. Starting off by supporting people is really important because it has the added benefit that if you support people, do you show that you're aware of the constraints upon them, then you're more likely to build trust with them. But I suppose in terms of human nature, it seems to me that what we need to shift away from is as I say this overly individualistic and cognitivistic notion of the subject towards an understanding of social understanding of the subject in which the formation of relationships. Both between individuals in groups, those relationships of solidarity, and between different groups, say the public and the government, and when those are antagonistic and when they're not antagonistic and understanding that understanding that importance of identities and relationships is critical at a whole series of levels. It's critical in terms of understanding our reasoning. In a way, we calculate interest. You can't ask what is in somebody's self interest, unless you interrogate the nature of that self, and often the variability in how we act isn't due to our irrationality and incapacity of reasoning. It's because of variabilities and how we see the self so for me, understanding social relationships is not saying reasoning and cognition is unimportant. It's saying that actually they're critically important, but the way we reason is dependent upon identities and the way in which we process information. We take this information seriously is as much to do with our social relationships, the source of information than the nature of that information itself. These issues, however, these issues of the social subject and our social relationships and our social saves selves aren't just about reasoning. I think they're also critical to morality to who is part of our moral universe and who isn't to who we see as friend and foe and how we treat people. It's a critical moral dimension. And also, as I've tried to argue, it's even important to our embodiment to our health to our mental health and to our physical health. I hope we've understood something about the importance of relationships, something about the importance of building inclusive communities and something about how we can do that in the future. And if you take those understandings forward, at least as far as human behavior and psychology is concerned, I do genuinely think there is a prospect of building back better. And my voice has made it. So I will stop at that point. Thank you very much indeed, Steve for a wonderful talk. We now have a five minute break in which people can type questions. You can get yourself a drink of water. Steve, I hope you're okay to carry on a bit and ask questions. Some people are putting messages in the chat to say clap. I'm sorry that it ends with silence. I'm sure if you had been in an live audience that would have been a massive round of applause, we can only imagine that happening so we'll have a brief pause now and then we'll have the questions. Thank you. Okay Steve, there are quite a few questions and I'm going to combine some of them into single questions. So, let me begin somebody quite early in your talk. Obviously, the book Lord of the Flies came to mind thinking that we only have a veneer of civilized behavior and as this beast, waiting to get out and the question is agreeing with you that humans are essentially social beings. But what the questioner is wondering about is that. Actually, though, are political class perhaps or the government maybe didn't adopt quite the same paradigm as as people did perhaps there were more elitist disregarding of the rules or perhaps they have this view as you said yourself in times that people are in they don't they're free or they're not capable of making sensible decisions in a crisis and the question is wondering whether it's anything to do with how people, what their educational background has been and is it perhaps a coincidence that our government tends to come from a particular class. Okay, now I mean there are lots of really important questions that let me start with Lord of the flies. I don't subscribe to that Lord of the flies notion that the state of nature is a state of chaos that sort of slightly Hobbesian view of the world. The things are at root, brutal, and therefore you need society to socialize them. I mean my sense of human behavior is that, in a sense, I wouldn't naturalize either the positives or the negatives the brutalities or the kindnesses and there's a very interesting book by as a fragment called human kind which tries to give you the opposite thesis, which is that human beings are fundamentally kind. To me, we have the capacity to do both, and which we do is not a function of something given in human psychology, but the social and political where it is, in which we form ourselves into groups, and we create notions of us and them. And to illustrate that, I often contrast to very different things. So, in 1934, a little booklet called the ABC of National Socialism was distributed to every school in Germany. And it said what is the first commandment of national socialism. You can love by ethnic comrade as myself. Okay, so it's about loving the in group. But of course, the sting in the tail is that the in group is defined in ethnic terms. So Jewish people are out with that community. Therefore, then Jewish people are seen as a danger to the in group community. And therefore that opens the way to to genocidal behavior. I also did some studies around one of the most remarkable access solidarity in the Holocaust which is the rescue of Bulgarian Jews twice. When the Nazis tried to deport Bulgarian Jews to the death camps, twice Bulgarians mobilized and stop them to the extent that there were more Jews living in Bulgaria at the end of the war than at the beginning of the war, even though it was under access control. And when you looked at the documents that mobilized people, they were fascinating, because at one level they were precisely the same as the ABC of National Socialism. We must love and we must support the national community. But they then make they often they don't even use the word you, they talk about people as a national minority. Or if they do talk about Jews they will talk about how Jews are exactly the same as us have the same folk songs have the same culture that they're in group. So in both cases about living the loving the in group and challenging the out group. They just draw the boundaries in different places and include and exclude so I think we have the capacity to be remarkably kind to sacrifice ourselves. We have the capacity to act in quite appalling ways. And it's very much dependent, as I say, on how we draw those lines of us and them it also makes us accountable, because whether we choose to show that solidarity, or show that viciousness is up to up to us it's the nature it's not inscribed in who in who we are. As for why the government has a particular view of us and them, and why the government seems to have a rather paternalistic notion of the of the general public. And is ideological, whether it specifically comes from their education. Well, I haven't been to eat and so I can't entirely tell, but I would argue that what we're looking at here are ideologies, which lead to the ways in which we construct our categories we construct our social relationships construct who is us, and who is them, and certainly a paternalistic ideology I think is at the root of many of the of the problems of the handling of the pandemic. There's a number of questions around the theme of identifying with groups. And some people are suggesting that this is a great thing in many ways but it's a double edged sword, because sometimes identifying with a particular group can create divisions and hostilities. And, and so, how do we, how do people choose which group to identify with and how do we try to make these groups coexist alongside each other and not behave in a hostile way to each other. So let me tell you about a couple of experiments we did years ago I'm a psychologist I use various methods, some of which are experimental some of which are field studies ethnographic study but I quite like experiments as as demonstrations as pieces of theater so we did a study. Where we took Manchester United football supporters. And we told them we were interested them as Manchester United supporters, and could they walk to another building where we would hold the study and as they went there they saw somebody running along, falling over and hurting themselves. One person was either wearing a Manchester United t shirt, a Liverpool t shirt or a plain red t shirt. Okay, and they help the Manchester United person with a match snug t shirt not person with a Liverpool t shirt or the red t shirt. Okay, shows that we help in group members was very clear data I mean it's very, it actually was on a, on a BBC documentary called five steps tyranny and it's, it's wearing but it's almost funny that when the person is in group they immediately go up to them see how are you. When they're out group they sort of look and they, they run away. But actually the most interesting part of the study was that in a second version, we did exactly the same thing. But we said to people, we're interested new as football fans. So we're still Manchester United fans, which is said we're interested in football fans. And there they help the person with the Manchester United shirt and the Liverpool shirt. So the point of the study for us was about the malleability of these category boundaries. Now a similar study, logically at least. This was a study where it involved a young woman of Chinese background, who was wearing a Scotland football shirt. Okay, she's walking along with a load of pencils and she trips and they fall to the floor and do people help her pick them up. Now, the participants in this study were just given a lecture in which we either defined Scottishness in ethnic terms being Scottish is being born in Scotland Scottish parents, or in civic terms being Scotland is living in Scotland and being committed to Scotland's Scotland's future. Okay. Now, by her face. This young woman was an ethnic out group by her shirt. She's wearing a Scotland football shirt and Scotland's flag was on her chest by a shirt. She was a civic in group member. And when we define things in ethnic terms people didn't help her. And when we define things in civic terms, they did help her. So my point is, it's not that groups are good or bad that whether we get the best or the worst depends, first of all, on how we draw the boundaries of inclusion. What does it mean to be us? What does it mean to be Scottish, and so on. But the second thing that is equally important are the norms and values of the group which are equally open to contestation. And so I think what it alerts us to is not that groups are good or bad, but we need to be very careful about how we draw the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, and how we define the norms and the values of the group in order to achieve the positives. One further factor. One fact, when you look at most acts of extreme evil, evil is a problematic term, nearly always those who act on the basis of a moral claim. One of the best studies of Nazism I know is a book by a woman called Claudio Kunst, a German historian called the Nazi conscience. And the point she makes was that although we don't like to think about it, if we to understand the power of Nazism, we've got to understand it as a moral project, that it was set up as a moral project and between 1933 when he came to power in 1939, Hitler hardly ever talked about Jews, he just talked about Germany and how Germany is moral and how it's a shining light and how it's, you know, it's the source of goodness in the world. Many people thought, oh well, that means he's dropped his anti-Semitism. What they didn't understand was actually if you have a sense of us and them. If on top of that you constitute us as the good, as a source of good in the world, then to the extent that the other is a threat to the in-group, they're a threat to the good, and their destruction could be a moral project, right, in a completely distorted way. Again, it says to us if we want to understand acts of evil, we've got to understand something about the ways in which we construct our groups, and I think we need to be aware groups which have this Manichaean sense of morality combined with a sense of threat. So the third factor on top of how we construct our boundaries and we construe the content of who we are, including that moral dimension, is the sense of our relationship to the other and the extent to which they're seen as a threat. And you see that at the moment. When you look at many acts of destruction, they are based on the notion that there is an out-group which is destroying the moral in-group. That's at the core of various replacement theories of the far right, for instance, which say these people coming from elsewhere are going to destroy our advanced Western civilization. You saw it in the manifesto from Brevik and so on. So I do think if we understand these processes, it alerts us to where there is danger and it alerts us to where to look for in terms of danger in the ways we construe the nature of our groups. The groups, you're quite right, they're the best of worlds, they're the worst of worlds, and which they are depends upon attention to how we define and construe boundaries, category contents and relationships between groups. There's also some questions concerned with the effect of the example that people see based on what others are doing. So, you know, we saw that in the floating of rules by some politicians, we see it. Sometimes there are reluctance to follow the example of other countries who seem to have been doing things better than we were. Well, what's your take on how people respond to any, you know, examples that say seeing that Dominic Cummings didn't stick to the rules, does the people tend to say, well, why should I or are they sensorial and might the recognition that that was wrong make people feel I'm better than that. I can do it. That's a really good question. I mean the first thing to be said is going back to the points I was making about groups and social relationships. I mean, in many ways, I start from the premise that those category definitions and boundaries are absolutely central. For instance, is often rooted in the sense that authority is of us and for us that they in technical terms they're in group members. And that you get much more trust in situations where you act in ways towards people as if you see them one of us rather than one of them. And so, of course, one of the most corrosive things of trust is a sense of us and them. They're not doing things as members of our group for our group. They are a different group acting in their interests against our group. And of course the thing about Cummings was it led to a sense of us and them. And in fact, actually the critical thing about the Cummings incident wasn't what Cummings did. It was when he was defended by the government, so it became not an individual act. It became a, if you like, systemic issue. So I certainly think that division into us and them undermines trust. Now, whether that trust impacted adherence, there's some rather interesting research that shows that if you like look at trust in the British government, the English government and the Scottish government, it's pretty similar at the beginning of the pandemic. After Cummings, it becomes like night and day. I mean, trust in Johnson's government plummets to about 20%. Trust in Sturgeon's government remains about 70%. But interestingly, adherence doesn't differ that much. And one of the reasons is that quite a few of the people, this is some lovely work by one called Daisy Fancourt in London, for a lot of people, they were adhering despite the government. They were trying to say precisely, we're not like that. And in our own research, we have similar results. What we find is that in terms of adherence, what is critical is not trusting government because you can, you can adhere despite government. It's trust in medical and scientific authorities, because if you don't trust them, then you don't believe there's a pandemic, and therefore you see no point at all in adhering at all. So I think it is really important to acknowledge the corrosive nature of authorities doing different things from what they tell the rest of us to do, but it's impact upon adherence, I think, is more complicated. There's also a question about some politicians, perhaps we shouldn't say who in particular have said there's no such thing as society. And treated people as disconnected individuals. The questioner is wondering, does that attitude make it harder for us to develop solutions to many emergencies, including the climate change emergency, if we don't act as a society and don't recognize societies. Another set of studies that we did years ago. We were running studies, this was the beginning of my work with my colleague John Drury, who's at Sussex University on behavior and emergencies, and we had developed a virtual reality simulation of a fire at King's Cross Underground. And what we'd expected was that if people came in a group, if you had a group of football supporters, there was an emergency, they'd support each other. But if you just had ordinary commuters, they'd be individuals and they wouldn't support each other as much. And what we found nearly always was that people supported each other, they didn't push and shove together the escalators, they attended to people who were injured. And that way they coordinated better, they got out more quickly. And one of the reasons for this was precisely that the emergency itself created a sense of shared identity. In fact, we've been doing some more virtual reality studies in the last few weeks, which showed that very clearly. So it shows that if in a disaster you see people running, you have a sense of, oh, we're all in this together and it develops a sense of shared identity. So the disaster developed shared identity. There was one exception. It was the only exception we could find where people didn't help each other. And that's where we said to people, you're going for sales. And when they were going for sales, they got off that tube and they rushed out as fast as they could because they wanted to be the first person to get that mark. Now, the interesting thing is that, of course, in terms of the sales, we are positioned as individual consumers in competition with each other. And that is corrosive of the development of a sense of shared identity. And there's some work on this. So for instance, you know, the way in which over the in recent years, you know, patients start stop being patients in the hospital and started being consumers. Let's say the way in which, you know, neoliberalism is increasingly atomizing us and is treating students, you know, our students are our customers and they're not my customers. You know, I'm not a shopkeeper. They're my students. So I do think there is something about ideologies, but not just ideologies, but practices which atomize people and set them against each other. What's more, for me, the government is trust of the public, not only alienated them from the public, but alienated the public from each other. Because if you tell people, look, your neighbors might be COVID, you know, so we're holding parties and so on. If you stress, you know, those types of things, you create distrust and you atomize people in society. So one of my concerns about the behavior of the government is that not only did they alienate themselves from the public, they alienated the public from each other. And in many ways, if I wanted to give a simple message, it would be this, it was that in an emergency, shared identity is the most important thing for making an asset of the public. So the responsibility of a government is to understand and to nurture shared identity. And I think, you know, this government to a large extent squandered that remarkable resource we had, you know, a year and a half ago, I think it's remained more in Scotland. And I think it has also remained, but despite the government, but I think that I think the way in which they acted and the ways in which they, you know, created a sense of mistrust in your neighbor. And not your neighbor is there to support you giving you resilience, but your neighbor spy on them, because they might be out doing bad things. I think that's completely counterproductive. Yes, yes. I mentioned they're the competitive consumer. And also a few questions around panic buying and is panic buying due to a stirring up of a feeling that you need to compete to get it and you must get out there or is it people genuinely trying to get the resources they need for their families. I've spoken quite a lot in the media about panic buying and I one of the things I've tried to do is to get them to stop using that term because I find it a profoundly unhelpful term, because the word panic. It's evaluative it doesn't describe anything at all. The really interesting thing is, I often, you know, you would have this format whereby you know the media will show a little film with various Vox pops of people at a filling station. And each person is very far from panicking. They're saying, well, you know, I'm a midwife, I've got to get to work. So I've got to, I've got to fill up. Or else they will say I'm a teacher, I can't not be in school. And then they talk about panic buying after having shown lots of people talking perfectly reasonably and not panicking in the slightest. The thing about panic buying it raises two issues. One of the most general issue is that often in human behavior, we tend to think that the critical thing in human behavior is what people think. But actually, often more critical is what we think others think for various reasons. Now in the case of panic buying, actually the phenomenon is being led to believe that others are panic buying. And if you believe that others are panic buying, the irrational thing to do would be to not be in the queue because then you'll lose out. So what people are doing is perfectly reasonable, premised on what they're told about others. And so the issue is about the information they're given about what others are doing. They're ideologies, media representations and so on become become critical. And the very term panic buying is part of the problem, because it sets up a context in which it is rational, not only to get the resource but to get as much of that resources you can on the ground since it's not going to be around for a while. The other point about panic buying and again I think this is really important is, again, it's psychologize what is often a systemic problem. And if you looked at what happened at the beginning of the pandemic, actually demand it only went up about 10%. The problem was the just in time supply chain. So it was the ways in which, you know, we organize ourselves systemically, but if you blame panic buying and you say what's you use the stupid public, not only disunderstand the phenomenon, you take attention away from where the problem really lies. So again, it has that double problem. There are some questions around the issue of vaccinations and vaccine deniers and one question I was asking, for example, should we be trying harder to bring deniers into an in group. And then to bond with deniers instead of denigrating them. And, and also do you think that just just explaining risks more clearly to people will help alleviate their fears or is it actually people rebelling against the government telling them what to do. Okay, so those are really good questions. The first thing I think is it's really important to make a distinction between three types of people. One are people who aren't vaccinated. And in the under 30s that's about 30%. I mean it's changing course but it's quite a lot. And then there are the vaccine hesitant those who have got concerns or have actually refused a vaccine. And then you have vaccine deniers who who actively talk about it being control. A lot of the problem lies in those who simply haven't got around to get vaccinated even though they're not vaccine hesitant or vaccine deniers. So, as I said at the beginning, overall only 4% of people are vaccinated hesitant and even amongst younger age groups, it's only about 10%. So most people are the vaccine indifferent, right? They can't be bothered. They haven't got around to it. They haven't got around to it partly because the message has been given out that well infections on that serious. So there's no need to do anything about it. And they haven't got around to it so it's because it's a bit of a hassle. For them, I think you increase vaccination by making vaccination easier by making taking vaccine, vaccine centers to them by for instance dealing with practical impediments. I mean, will people get paid time off work. If they are a bit poorly, you know, you've had the jab, you're a bit under the weather, do you, you know, can you can you get time off and so on. There should be practical issues making it easier taking it to people rather than asking people to come to you. Okay, so that's one category. The second category are people who are vaccine hesitant. In the sense they have questions, right. They want to know what effect will it have on me if I'm pregnant. Will it affect my fertility. Not if I have sickle cell disease are their issues there genuine questions and perfectly sensible questions. The vaccine deniers don't have questions. They have answers they know it's wrong no information is going to help them. So I think for those who are vaccine hesitant and have worries, their engagement is really absolutely critical and gaining trust, because in the end, you're in, if you like a struggle for credibility, you have the person who on the one hand has official information saying look at safe and the vaccine deniers saying it's not safe. And who are they going to listen to. It's going to be those who they trust most. And if you treat them as other and treat them as fools and you insult them, and so on, you're going to drive them in the hands of the deniers at the outset of vaccination and then continuing the WHO said make community engagement, the very center of vaccine roll out and I don't think we've heated that enough. I think my my two points will be number one, make it easier for the vaccine indifferent. Secondly, engage work with communities, go through community leaders, listen to people's concerns and treat them with respect. If you don't treat them with respect, you'll alienate them. The actual vaccine deniers are a handful of people. You're not going to win them over there. They are a convinced out group which sees you as out group isn't going to listen. The point is, you can undermine their influence if you work in such a way as to gain the trust of those they're trying to appeal, try to appeal to. Okay, we're almost run out of time, Steve. I just like to ask you one final question which is actually a question coming from me. I have, as obviously everybody knows we have a climate crisis we have a biodiversity crisis. Obviously, human behavior is extremely important in how we deal with that. I wanted to ask you, you talked quite a lot about solidarity and how important that is. I think trying to encourage people to feel solidarity, not just with the people around them, but with other species. Also, and also solidarity with future generations and not just the current one. So a broader compassionate approach that encompasses other species and what they're facing and the future generations and what they're going to be facing. Can we encourage that behavior in any way? That's a really interesting question and I mean on the whole when when social psychologists have talked about different levels of identification they've talked about the individual level, the group level and the level of humanity as a whole and it's difficult enough getting to humanity, let alone to, you know, to all living creatures. And later, however, the Frankfurt School, you know, Adorno, Hawkeimer and so on, is very well known in psychology for their work on the authoritarian personality. What's less known and I think is really fascinating is there is their work on our relationship to nature. And I think one of the most fundamental issues that we need to address is that notion and particularly the way we've moved towards a sense of sort of living with nature but dominating nature. So things like, you know, we expect to be able to create the exact same climate for ourselves inside our houses, summer or winter, ignore, we can overcome seasons, or in terms of food, right. I mean, I'm old enough to remember, you know, the first strawberry of summer, which is always wonderful. Now you have things all way around. We can dominate nature to the extent that the rhythms of nature and the realities of nature. We are seeking to overcome in every single way. And even in terms of the pandemic, of course people will argue that it's trying to overcome species boundaries, which has led to animal viruses becoming so toxic for human beings. So I think that issue of our relationship to nature and trying to question that sense of domination, we can live as if nature wasn't there, we can overcome it, is deeply, deeply problematic. So I think those really basic issues have got to be confronted. And I do think, as I say, the writings of the Frankfurt School are really interesting, and we need to discover those issues. Okay, Steve, I think it's now just after nine, and I'm sorry for the people whose questions that we haven't had time to answer, but we've covered many of the questions we've covered a lot of ground. There have been lots of positive feedback in the chat. Bravo is the consensus. And thank you so much for such an eloquent talk and also for such really a not listening view on humanity. So thank you very much to everybody who's been listening. We have a break in our talks now due to partly due wanted a gap around the COP 26 conference and our next talk will be in November you'll get more information on that it's going to be a talk that's going to take us into the world of flies. And that is going to be a fascinating talk. So once again, Steve, thank you so much. I wish we could give you a round of applause, but it was extremely informative and extremely enjoyable so thank you so much and thanks to the audience for all their interesting questions. Thank you for inviting me think the audience. If anybody does have a question and wants to email me you can easily find me by just by Googling it to Andrews then I'd be very happy if I can to answer your questions, but thanks for listening. Bye.