Sphinx

Has the Independent Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) read Thucydides, or Camus? The indications aren’t promising; on the basis of the publication yesterday of the evidence supporting the UK government’s rapidly evolving (sic.) strategy to handle the epidemic, this is the Scene That Celebrates Itself, with a list of scholarly literature mostly consisting of publications by members of the group (way to massage the h-index, guys!). Yes, a major plank in the case for deploying behavioural science to deal with the coronavirus outbreak is an op ed article arguing for the deployment of behavioural science to desk with the coronavirus outbreak…

What they do have, of course, is a lot of polling data about how people say they would respond to different sorts of interventions, as a basis for anticipating behaviour and trying to ‘nudge’ it in the right directions. What worries me is not the accuracy of this data and how it’s analysed, or even whether we can trust that the people being polled are telling the truth (an issue, of course, in political polling); it’s the fact that people are being asked to imagine how they might behave in an imagined, unfamiliar situation. They haven’t lived through a fast-spreading pandemic; how can they know how they would actually respond, in completely new conditions?

This is why we need history, whether the detailed records of the influenza pandemic of the early 20th century or the careful account of Thucydides of the Athenian plague or the imaginative reconstruction of Camus: as a means of understanding how people may behave under unprecedented conditions of stress and uncertainty. A key aspect of Thucydides’ account is precisely that they don’t behave ‘normally’; the traditional institutions, values and social expectations all buckle and collapse, time horizons shrink – live for the moment’s pleasure, because wealth and life are transitory, and the path of honour takes too long – and emotional states are dramatically heightened, from absolute despair to unshakable confidence.

It’s entirely plausible to argue, as people like Josh Ober and Aaron Turner have done, that Thucydides needs to be considered through the lens of social psychology – the Sicilian Debate as a case study in cognitive traps and biases, for example. But it’s not normative social science, establishing clear principles on the basis of a fixed idea of human nature. On the contrary, Thucydides’ ‘human thing’ is fuzzy, inconsistent, and somewhat unpredictable; just as no single remedy for the plague works for everybody, so not everyone responds in the same way. Some shun the sick, even their own families, while others risk their lives to keep looking after them; and reducing this to a quantified estimate of self-sacrifice probability rather misses the point.

Indeed, if I were inclined to be really sarcastic, I might suggest that Thucydides’ juxtaposition of the noble, in retrospect entirely unrealistic generalisations of Pericles’ Funeral Oration and the horrors of the plague – which of course also carried off Pericles – offers a possible analogy for the fate of the Nudge Unit…