How behavioural scientists are enabling the 'elite' to rule the world

The nudgers’ key role in the authoritarian template

It is increasingly apparent that people’s day-to-day lives are being shaped by a global elite that reside outside of our democratic systems. And our experiences over the last three years strongly suggest that these powerful actors are repeatedly deploying a three-stage process – an authoritarian template – to achieve their self-serving goals. The process approximates to:  

STEP 1: Identify the specific restrictions or controls to impose (such as less travel, less meat-eating, digital IDs, and social credit systems).

STEP 2: Claim there is an imminent existential threat (be it from a plague, climate catastrophe, food shortages, war, pollution).

STEP 3: Deploy coercion, propaganda, censorship, and psychological manipulation to promote mass compliance with restrictions and controls.

State-funded behavioural scientists - via their application of often-covert ‘nudge’ techniques - are a crucial component of Step 3. By means of their deployment of psychological strategies that commonly weaponize fear, shame, and scapegoating, they facilitate the top-down control of ordinary people. HART believes it is important to increase awareness of this process of mass manipulation by this insidious group of government scientists, particularly in light of recent evidence of their growing stridency and double speak. 

Without doubt, the global elite are an extraordinarily powerful collective. Typically operating in a murky stratosphere outside of democratic systems, where conflicts of interests go unchallenged, they include: corporate multinational companies; the World Bank; coalitions of wealthy nations, such as the G7 and G20; the World Economic Forum; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (and its various offshoots), and the World Health Organisation. While these organisations wield considerable levels of influence in their own right, their impact on our day-to-day lives would be much less if it were not for behavioural scientists’ pivotal role in achieving the obedience of the masses.

Ethical concerns associated with the state’s strategic use of nudge techniques have been well documented. Should a government deliberately inflict emotional distress upon its own citizens as a means of gaining their compliance with what are often non-evidenced and collaterally damaging restrictions? And, given that behavioural science interventions commonly achieve their influence below the target person’s awareness, are such tactics rightly tagged as manipulative? Lamentably, the stakeholders actively involved in nudging during the covid event have displayed a stark reluctance to address these important questions.  

If the gross neglect of ethical principles was not troubling enough, the recent pronouncements by prominent UK behavioural scientists – the enforcers of stage 3 of the authoritarian template – also indicate escalating stridency and duplicity.

Professor David Halpern (the chief executive of the Behavioural Insight Team [BIT], aka the ‘Nudge Unit’) exemplifies this increasing confidence. In a January 2023 interview with The Telegraph, Halpern described how he had nudged Boris Johnson, the serving Prime Minister, into wearing a mask: ‘We did share with him a slide pack at one point. It had a series of images of pretty much every single world leader wearing a mask, and then a picture with him not’. This subliminal prod, to covertly exert normative pressure on Johnson, was used to point out that ‘a normal thing for a world leader to do right now is wear a mask’. In the same interview, Halpern goes on to express his intent for a behavioural ‘scaffolding’ to be put in place to encourage mask wearing in Britain. So despite the wealth of empirical evidence that the wearing of face coverings in community settings is both ineffective and harmful, Halpern felt justified in promoting widespread masking, presumably because such a policy chimed with his own ideological beliefs.

In a more recent (July 2023) interview with The Telegraph, while discussing the receptiveness of the general population to future lockdowns and other restrictions, Halpern glibly talks about human beings as if they are machines to be tinkered with. In the world of this arch nudger, those of us living a life without fear are ‘wrongly calibrated’, in need of scary messaging to return us to the right track. He goes on to say that ‘once you’ve practised something’ … lockdowns, mask wearing … ‘you can switch it back on … you’ve got the beginnings of a habit loop … we’ve practised the drill’. And he seems to imply that the collateral damage of these interventions is an acceptable price to pay: while recalling an incident he had observed on a train, where a maskless person was close to being physically assaulted by masked passengers, he casually refers to it as ‘social pressure in action’.

Furthermore, behavioural scientists appear to have undergone a transformative experience. Perhaps a growing awareness of the considerable net damage of their scare-and-restrict approach to pandemic management has led to a series of self-serving memory biases – or just plain duplicity – as a means of evading the escalating criticism of their approach. To illustrate, let us compare some of their earlier output with their more recent comments and actions:

What can account for this volte-face?

As behavioural science is now a lucrative business, with the nudgers embedded in all areas of government (national and global), actively influencing every aspect of our day-to-day lives, it is understandable why they might not wish to relinquish their privileged positions. Furthermore, it may be that they are relishing their key role in enforcing the world elite’s top-down authoritarianism, this government overreach chiming with their own political ideology – a hypothesis made more plausible by the fact that Michie (a life-long communist) now occupies a key role at the WHO, chairing their ‘Behavioural Insights’ group. If these prominent behavioural scientists ever experience uncomfortable moments when they question the morality of their work, perhaps they self-soothe by reciting their collectivist ‘for the greater good’ and ‘social responsibility’ mantras.Prophetically, in his 2019 book, Inside the Nudge Unit, Halpern issued a warning to his own profession: ‘It is just too easy for us to tell ourselves a story that the “best” option for another person just happens to be the one that is in our own best interests’ (p325).

It is high time the behavioural scientists reflect upon this remarkable piece of foresight from one of their own.