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“lockdown fatigue" is a real thing.
Citation needed.
Me. And all the people sat out in the parks in Hackney this weekend.
This was debunked. It came from government and Whitty, not the behavioural advisors.
Source?
ffm-
When people aren’t given clear direction they do their own thing.
I’ll try and find it...
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‘The delay to introducing stricter measures, until the lockdown was finally ordered on 23 March, appears to have been at least partly based on a flawed misreading of the government’s own scientific advice. In early March, Whitty mentioned the idea that the government should wait to impose restrictions because people might tire of them, later saying this was based on both “common sense” and “behavioural science”. “What we are moving now to is a phase when we will be having to ask members of the general public to do different things than they would normally do,” he said. “There is a risk if we go too early people will understandably get fatigued and it will be difficult to sustain this over time.”
Hancock supported that, suggesting it was the result of official advice. “The evidence of past epidemics and past crises of this nature shows that people do tire of these sorts of social distancing measures, so if we start them too early, they lose their effect and actually it is worse,” he said. “The social science and the behavioural science are a very important part of the scientific advice that we rely on.”
Yet this concept of “fatigue” was rejected by the behavioural scientists appointed by the government itself to Sage’s subcommittee, SPI–B. “The word was never used in any of our committee reports,” said Susan Michie, a SPI-B member. “It is just not a concept that exists in behavioural science, and it was unhelpful for it to be used.” Four other members of SPI-B also told the Guardian that the committee never advised that people would tire of restrictive measures.
The publicly available summaries of their conclusions show the group advised that people should be given clear explanations and reasons for social distancing measures, and warn that those measures would affect people unequally, but nowhere do they suggest that people will become “fatigued”. Three behavioural scientists on SPI-B, Stephen Reicher, John Drury and Clifford Stott, even wrote an article for the Psychologist journal, rejecting the notion of “fatigue” and suggesting that delaying stricter social distancing measures on that premise was taking a risk with lives. “Psychological considerations were put at odds with what medical science demanded,” they wrote.
The Guardian understands that Halpern’s Behavioural Insights Team, or “nudge unit”, was also opposed to this view that people would tire of restrictive measures. One senior Whitehall source said Whitty himself was the main advocate of the “fatigue” notion, based partly on his own experience of patients in medical practice who do not see drug prescriptions through to their completion.
A Downing Street spokesperson, responding on behalf of Whitty, emphasised that he was indeed concerned about timing interventions, and their impact on people’s wellbeing if introduced too early, and that Sage had agreed a balance needed to be struck between the impact of measures, and the time the public could feasibly sustain them.’
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miro_o
Citation needed!
This was debunked. It came from government and Whitty, not the behavioural advisors.
Whitty cited his experience of patients and antibiotic courses. It didn’t come from the behavioural studies because they don’t support the idea.