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Also from Laura Dodsworth is this summary of how the British government “used behavioural science to scare a nation into submission.” A slice:

Using fear is ethically dubious (đáng ngờ về đạo đức) at best. If psychologists were provoking fear in a laboratory experiment they would need the consent of the people taking part. Yet we never signed consent forms, and this huge social experiment has not been through any ethics committee.

We didn’t notice, maybe we didn’t even care, when behavioural psychologists were ‘nudging’ us into paying taxes on time, or cutting down smoking, but their underhand (lừa lọc, dối trá, dấu giếm, lén lút, không cởi mở, nham hiểm) tactics have certainly got our attention now. You could argue that frightening people to make them follow the rules during an emergency was in our best interests. But what about the opposing arguments that it affected our personalities, our mental health and our agency?

The insufficiently fearful were deliberately alarmed. Horror film styled advertising, laws to manage the minutiae (chi tiết vụn vặt) of our daily lives, the most punitive fines since the Dark Ages, encouraging social conformity and the alarmist use of statistics were just some of the government’s tactics during the pandemic, signalling their lack of trust in the public’s ability to understand risk and behave sensibly.

Even children were not exempt from such blame. Indeed, they were explicitly targeted with messaging warning “Don’t kill granny.” This shocking slogan looks even more abhorrent given the allegations that the elderly were not tested before being transferred from hospital to care homes – who killed granny, exactly?

Bài trước: Các biện pháp mạnh để chống dịch Covid-19