I’m a behavioural scientist – we won’t blindly obey the rules of another pandemic

Professor of Behavioural Science at LSE and the author of Beliefism: How to Stop Hating the People We Disagree With The outbreak of another pandemic as dangerous as Covid-19 is at the top of the Government’s risk register of threats to the UK, released last month. The experience of the last pandemic should mean that we would go into another with our eyes open and a network of experts ready to react to it. But as budgets are tightened across Government, would the NHS be able to cope with a new pandemic? And having been through lockdowns – and seen some people flout restrictions – could we be expected to follow the rules like before? So, are we ready for the next pandemic? Former deputy chief medical officer for England Dame Jenny Harries and behavioural scientist Paul Dolan give their perspectives. I make lots of predictions about human behaviour. I get a lot wrong, but here’s something I can confidently predict: if we had another pandemic, most people would not come anywhere close to sticking to any rules or restrictions. When Covid-19 arrived in early 2020, experts warned that the NHS could be overwhelmed. Under those circumstances, most people complied with extraordinary restrictions on their lives. They stayed at home, avoided family and friends and accepted limitations on their freedom that would have seemed unimaginable only weeks earlier. The remarkable levels of compliance can be explained by high levels of fear, and because the rules were perceived as proportionate and fairly applied to everyone. Next time around, we will remember the cancelled weddings and missed funerals. We will remember children learning through laptop screens and students isolated in university rooms. We will remember grandparents separated from grandchildren and months of uncertainty about when normal life would return. We might disagree about whether some restrictions were justified, but there can be little disagreement that they came at a very high cost. Back then, those costs were largely hypothetical. Today, they are part of lived experience. This matters because human beings do not assess risks in a vacuum. We learn from experience. The first time around, people were being asked to make sacrifices under conditions of uncertainty. Next time, they will weigh any proposed restrictions against costs they have already experienced first-hand. The bar for compliance will therefore be higher. To be clear, I am not suggesting that people would refuse to co-operate in the face of genuine danger. If a future pathogen were significantly more lethal than Covid-19, or if hospitals were visibly overwhelmed, most citizens would probably support robust interventions. But, support would be much more conditional. And people would ask important questions much earlier. How dangerous is this virus? Who is most at risk? What evidence supports these restrictions? What are the likely consequences for education, mental health and livelihoods? Are there less disruptive alternatives? These are the kinds of questions citizens in a democracy should ask. In fact, they should have been asked sooner and more frequently during Covid-19. Questions about how best to respond to a pandemic require that we can trust those answering them. During the pandemic there was a close relationship between trust and compliance. Unfortunately, trust was repeatedly damaged. The most obvious example was Partygate. Its significance went far beyond a handful of social gatherings in Downing Street. For many people, it represented a breach of a basic principle: those making the rules should follow them too. In scientific terms, perhaps we are better prepared than ever for the next pandemic. We know more about disease surveillance, vaccine development and emergency planning than we did six years ago. But, pandemics are behavioural events as much as they are biological ones. Their success or failure depends not just on what governments ask people to do, but on whether people believe those requests are proportionate and applied to everyone equally. Last time, many people initially complied because they were frightened and uncertain. Next time, the virus won’t be the biggest challenge: it will be whether the public believes what they are told about it. Paul Dolan is professor of behavioural science at LSE and the author of Beliefism: How to Stop Hating the People We Disagree With What do you think?Are we ready for the next pandemic?