Has the UK government ‘weaponised fear’ in its communication around COVID risk?

The daily diet of statistics on deaths, hospitalisations and Covid cases has been so effective that compliance with lockdown has gone far beyond what ministers expected. But the problem with fear, as Paul Dolan said in this feature in the Daily Telegraph, is that “you can’t turn it on and off like a tap”. Whether frightening the public was a deliberate – or honest – tactic has become the subject of intense debate, and dozens of psychologists have now accused ministers of using “covert psychological strategies” to manipulate the public’s behaviour. Paul said: “The idea that you need to increase people’s personal threat disproportionately to the threat they face is a problem. It sets a very dangerous precedent – once the fear has been stoked you can’t diminish it.” Read article here.