By Stephen Reicher, Greater Good Magazine, July 7, 2021
During the pandemic, a lot of assumptions were made about how people behave. Many of those assumptions were wrong, and they led to disastrous policies.
Several governments worried that their pandemic restrictions would quickly lead to “behavioral fatigue” so that people would stop adhering to restrictions. In the U.K., the prime minister’s former chief adviser Dominic Cummings recently admitted that this was the reason for not locking down the country sooner.
Meanwhile, former health secretary Matt Hancock revealed that the government’s failure to provide financial and other forms of support for people to self-isolate was down to their fear that the system “might be gamed.” He warned that people who tested positive may then falsely claim that they had been in contact with all their friends, so they could all get a payment.
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