Hetan Shah on Social Science and the Pandemic

About this Podcast

COVID-19 has reshaped the social landscape across the globe. While it has brought much tragedy and economic destruction to many communities, it has also ignited a new appreciation for the significance of medical and social sciences. Hetan Shah notes that politicians are increasingly reliant on scientific experts, in many cases forming a close and dependent relationship with them.

In this podcast, Shah discusses the strengths and benefits of social science amidst the pandemic and how it has influenced policymakers to make better decisions for the future. Uncertainty is guaranteed, as there is no single, definitive answer to any challenge. With limited and ever-growing data, decisions are having to be made quickly, but social science has made great progress. Shah notes, “Anthropologists […] wouldn’t have been surprised at all by the panic buying of toilet paper. They have known for a long, long time, rooted in the work of people like Mary Douglas, the cultural and symbolic importance of things like cleanliness and security in times of crises.”

The ideas around what is and is not normal are also highlighted by anthropology. The customs we share in the West are “normal” and a basis upon which we evaluate “other” behaviors. Shah thinks that “the key is to bring an anthropological lens to our own behavior. What are the practices that we have and how can we change them?”

The discussion goes on to explore how the government might enforce the rules on social distancing and mask-wearing. Social science research has shown that praising those who keep to the rules is more effective at increasing compliance than publicly shaming those who do not. Shah goes on to note that COVID-19 has shone a light on social issues which have long been discussed, such as the unequal impact the disease has on ethnic minority communities.

Transcript
Key

DE: DAVID EDMONDS

HS: HETAN SHAH

DE: This is Social Science Bites with me, David Edmonds. Social Science Bites is a series of interviews with leading social scientists and is made in association with SAGE Publishing.

Well, welcome to the first Social Science interview recorded during the lockdown. The pandemic is reshaping all our lives. What role is there for social science in figuring out how to deal with the virus and in helping to understand its impact? Hetan Shah has recently become the chief executive of the British Academy, the national UK body for the humanities and the social sciences. Hetan Shah, welcome to Social Science Bites.

HS: Thanks very much. I’m delighted to be here.

DE: Let me start with an observation rather than a question. It’s interesting that when governments are trying to work out what to do during the current crisis, they appeal to the science. They say, this is what the science is telling us. But by that, they mean the natural sciences, not the social sciences.

HS: I don’t think that’s quite fair. I think that governments have recognized that the pandemic is not just a medical phenomenon but a social and economic one. I mean, naturally they’ve had lots of input from epidemiologists, et cetera. But I think they’ve unquestionably had social scientists involved as well.

So for example, if you look at the thinking that has gone on around how best to get people to wash their hands, there was behavioral science in which advert was most effective or the whole thing about singing “Happy Birthday” twice, which was a very memorable way of remembering that. On a completely different level, you’re looking at the UK’s economic package. That was not driven by a traditional center-right ideology. You couldn’t have predicted from the conservative manifesto this is where they would end up, with a furlough scheme, in effect putting millions of workers on the government payroll to keep their jobs alive. So economists have clearly been involved in all of that.

DE: Nonetheless, in Britain at least, when the government has its daily press conferences, there’s normally a medical expert standing next to the politicians rather than a social scientist. And what’s striking is the way that the science itself seems to be up for grabs. Whether we should wear face masks or not seems to be a matter of dispute, for example.

HS: I think this has been a really fascinating subplot of the whole pandemic, which is the way that science has played out as a discourse in the public sphere. You don’t have to go back many months for a period when politicians were relatively dismissive of experts. And then suddenly we’ve seen a shift now to where they’ve moved very close to scientists, and generally that’s a very good thing. As you say, we’ve seen the UK Prime Minister flanked by the chief medical officer and the chief scientific advisor or their equivalents at press conferences.

But it’s also been very interesting to see the government using this term “we are following the science.” I think this is where social science is helpful. And as you say, science is not monolithic. And so there’s a whole field that science and technology studies, STS, which is about the kind of sociology of science. And that really sheds light on the fact that, in a situation like this, there is a lot of uncertainty, especially where you’re using really quite limited data and doing decision making at speed.

So in those circumstances, there isn’t a single monolithic thing called the science, but there are multiple models, et cetera. And so that plays out both in terms of face masks, where it seems as if really the evidence is very much on the edge of one way or the other, whether it be useful. The medical side may say that a mask is useful, but actually the behavioral side may say it makes you feel invincible, so that negative kind of outweighs the positive medical side, as it were.

But then you’ve seen it in the way that competing models have popped up in the press. There was the imperial model, there was the Oxford model, all pointing in quite different directions. It does feel to me that the public has seemed to cope quite well and understood the level of uncertainty in the science, and it’s an argument for treating the public has grown ups.

DE: But this is not to take a relativistic approach to the natural science. Merely to say that as yet consensus hasn’t formed within the scientific community.

HS: That’s right. I mean, this is an area where we are making decisions at speed. The data is limited and being gathered as we speak, et cetera. So this is how science happens. I mean, there may well be settled science on these matters, but that may take really quite a lot of time. And again, this is why none of us envy our decision makers because they’re having to make decisions on imperfect knowledge.

DE: Now, one area where the social science is clearly important is understanding the spread of the disease, because we know it’s transmitted by people, but people can’t be reduced to a collection of atoms. We’re social creatures. So we need to know how we interact with each other. And, I guess, that’s where social science can help.

HS: It’s certainly an area that it can help, both in helping us understand what’s going on and sometimes predicting as well. For example, behavioral psychology, I think, has been very helpful in helping us think about the importance of social norms.

For example, when the press early on was saying, oh, look lots of people are breaking the rules and going out to the park, behavioral psychology sort of shows actually that’s not a good thing to be doing. It’s much better to be promoting the fact that most people are staying indoors, and that that promotion is more likely to lead to people doing that. Whereas actually, if you promote the few people that are breaking the rules, that’s more likely to instigate others to break the rules.

A different example, which has been getting into the news, is that the whole issue around ethnic minorities, who seem to be more vulnerable to the disease. The medical sciences might focus in on some of the genetic components around why that might be the case, but sociologists might be looking at the social components. Part of that might be, for example, do people from ethnic minorities– are they typically less well-off, are they poorer, et cetera.

So the social determinants of health. But there might also be things around the job roles that they have. Are they more likely to work, for example, in the NHS, or in doing deliveries, or in shops, which might then lead to diseases spreading, as it were.

So these are some of the insights. And then one other favorite one of mine is anthropologists, who wouldn’t have been at all surprised by the panic buying of toilet paper because they have known for a long, long time, rooted in the work of people like Mary Douglas, the cultural and symbolic importance of things like cleanliness and security in times of crises. And so you’ve seen the panic buying of toilet paper in many instances like this before.

DE: And this is obviously the worst pandemics in our lifetime, but it’s not the first pandemic in living memory. There’s been other huge international health scares, like SARS and so on. Have social scientists learnt anything from those episodes?

HS: Anthropologists were very involved, in particular actually, around Ebola– the way that that was being spread in African countries and were looking at the way that not just medical interventions were important but understanding and trying to intervene in local cultural practices. So for example, around the way that burial rights were conducted and working with local populations to change the way that those were done so that it was less likely to then infect people.

And I suppose anthropology always feels like it’s for other people. Other people have strange customs, but we’re normal in the West. What we do is normal. And of course, I think the key is to bring an anthropological lens to our own behavior. What are the practices that we have and how can we change them?

DE: A key decision governments had to take was when to go into lockdown and the demand that we all stay in our own homes. And the UK government, the US government, other governments have been accused of being slow to respond. The jury’s still out on that bit of the allegation, but if it turns out to be a reasonable charge, I wonder whether social science has any insights into how that mistake occurred.

HS: Without getting into answering that specific mistake, one of the things that the psychology and behavioral sciences show is that we all suffer from a range of biases. And of course, the key insight is that our leaders suffer them too. We all suffer from a kind of optimism bias. This wouldn’t happen to me, a kind of exponential myopia. So we don’t intuitively understand exponential growth.

There’s a herd instinct, so we take our cues from others. There’s that classic 1960s psychological experiment where you’re sat in a room and smoke starts blowing into it. If you’re on your own, you’re much more likely to get up and go and report it. If you’re with others who sort of carry on sitting there not doing anything, you will follow their lead probably and are far less likely to go and report it.

And there’s a hindsight bias as well, that all these things which now look obvious to us really were not that obvious a couple of months ago. So these are the kinds of things that social science can help us see. And I think it can make us look with more kindliness upon our leaders, because we realize that these biases that they suffer, they are human too.

DE: So they suffer from the same biases that we suffer from. Presumably, the world would be a better place if we were able somehow to mitigate those biases, somehow reduce the biases that they have. Are there ways of doing that? Are there ways that, were this to happen again, they would be less vulnerable to those kind of biases?

HS: Yeah, I mean, there’s been research done on what might be the way to deal with this. And I think the key point is that you need structures to mitigate biases and natural tendencies. For example, with optimism bias, you could conduct a premortem, where you imagine future failure and you work back to identify where things went wrong. And having done that, you’re less likely to fall into some of those pitfalls.

Or you ask people not to produce just one estimate of the future but two. One is a more central one, which is a kind of average. But then a second one, which is a slightly wider range one, which might pick up on those things which have perhaps a low probability but a high impact, of which this pandemic is one.

When it comes to herd instinct, you could set up what are known as “red teams.” So these are people tasked with taking a contrary view to puncture any group thinking that might be happening. And with what I described as exponential myopia, we need to improve the numerical and statistical literacy of our politicians and civil servants.

For example, I’ve always liked the old story of putting grains of rice on a chessboard, where you put one on the first square and then you double it. So two on the second square, four on the third square, and so on. And by the time you get to the 64th square, there isn’t enough rice in the world to fill the chessboard. And I think that’s a powerful image of what exponential growth looks like.

DE: Well, another reason why the lockdown didn’t occur immediately, putting aside these possible biases, was the psychology– psychology another social science. And it’s one area clearly where the governments have been reflecting on the social science, not just in the UK but elsewhere. They worried that an early lockdown would not be sustainable. That we’d suffer what’s been called “behavior fatigue.” That’s a highly contentious idea, isn’t it? Behavior fatigue.

HS: Yes, you’re right. So this idea of behavior fatigue was the idea that the public would get tired of the lockdown. I mean, there’s something kind of intuitively compelling about that. I think the data is now suggesting that that hypothesis was wrong.

For example, King’s Policy Institute, where I’m visiting professor, has done some polling with Ipsos MORI in early April, which showed that there was 89% support for the lockdown, with 68% of the public strongly agreeing with these government measures. And it’s very, very rare to see that level of support for any policy. So this does suggest that the public has not fatigued of these measures.

As you said, it was a contentious policy even at the time. So Nick Chater, who’s a fellow here at the British Academy, was one of 300 signatories of a letter about this back in March. And he also wrote a piece in The Guardian on the 16th of March. And let me just quote a bit from it, because I think it’s very powerful.

He says, “Behavioral fatigue, to my knowledge, has no basis in science. Indeed, with a compelling collective narrative, people are capable of maintaining remarkable solidarity over months and years, especially at times of national crisis.” And it does seem as if that analysis is the one that is now being borne out.

DE: Emerging from the pandemic, it looks like technology could play a key role, tracking us, identifying who we’ve been in contact with. And I guess it’s for the computer scientists to create the software. Maybe it’s for the philosophers to tackle the normative question about whether this invasion of our privacy is justified. But can social scientists tell us whether we’ll regard it as legitimate? Are there insights from the social science here?

HS: There are. So I’m Acting Chair of an organization called the Ada Lovelace Institute. And a few weeks ago, we did a rapid evidence review, which was involving lawyers, sociologists, ethicists, and others, looking at various of the technology solutions that are out there, for example, around digital contact tracing and digital immunity certificates. And there were social science insights alongside, as you say, the sort of more technological ones.

For example, on digital contact tracing, which is to give you an app to see who you’ve been meeting, et cetera, et cetera. One of the things that emerged from that evidence review is that the people who are most vulnerable to the virus are least likely to own a smartphone. And so there’s a kind of efficacy issue, which is not a technological one but a social one.

And then another insight from that was that mandatory compliance of an app would require the police to get involved. But actually, as we’ve seen, they’re already operating in really quite difficult circumstances. And there’s a question of whether they would be able to maintain their social license, which we’ve seen has been strained since the lockdown, where some people in the press have felt that they have been putting their noses in where they shouldn’t have been and overextending.

So our conclusion from that was that actually, if you do use digital contact tracing, there are these social issues and you only really use it to supplement manual contact tracing. On digital immunity certificates, similarly, we raised some concerns about the potential of creating a two-tier society if some people are allowed to get out and about and others are not, which could undermine the current sensor solidarity, the sense that we’re all in it together. And there are also some stigmatization issues.

So if people start using it for secondary purpose– so are you allowed to go into a hospital only if you have a digital imaging certificate? Are you only allowed into a cafe if you have that certificate? Et cetera, et cetera. And we’ve seen the rise of certain kinds of racism’s across many societies as a result of this pandemic– or at least an uncovering of racisms. And you can see that things like this, where people are asking for your proof to enter into things, could unhealthily cross over with that kind of stigmatization.

DE: We’re in the midst of the most extraordinary natural experiment. All sorts of social scientists will be looking at this period. For example, criminologists will be wondering what’s happened to the crime rates and the types of crimes committed. And I guess we’re not going to get the results of that research for some time, but can you give us some idea of what we can expect six months down the track?

HS: Yeah. I mean, it’s not a natural experiment in the usual sense, because the cause of the experiment– COVID– is going to affect the outcome, as it were. So in a sense, the interesting things we can track are the data on how the pandemic itself has affected us.

But there’ll be so many interesting things to learn from. Well-being data, how did people just fare and feel in the lockdown. And we have found in the past that people’s well-being can be difficult to predict. And it may well be that certain groups– their well-being is adjusted and they found ways to sort of cope, which would be great. But we don’t yet know. And similarly, measuring their consumption data– what did we eat and drink? Did we turn to treats of some sort to get us through? Those will all be quite interesting, if perhaps in some ways light weight.

There’s bigger and deeper things: poverty, unemployment, which are likely to be going up, and we will see those results I think, fairly quickly. The impact on mental health. So Daisy Fancourt at UCL, who is a British Academy Rising Star awardee, is looking at the effects of social distancing on mental health at the moment.

And there’s so many other changes that we’re seeing. Changes in working patterns. So will any of these stick? Are we going to see more remote working and more virtual meetings? This question of how far has society changed. I mean, I did notice that– I looked at this a few weeks ago– cruise bookings were holding up remarkably well for next year, which perhaps puts the lie to this idea that everything is about to change if people still want to go on their cruises.

So I think there’ll be all sorts of fascinating data about how the pandemic has affected us. One twist in all of this, of course, is that the pandemic is also affecting the research community itself and the future of higher education, which is really going to be taking a hit. So one worry is that there may be fewer social scientists who are around or who have the funding to actually look at some of this data.

DE: You mentioned lots of really interesting, intriguing areas. You didn’t mention divorce, whether there’s an increase in pregnancies. Also education, I guess, might be an interesting one and whether there is a growing gap between middle class parents who found ways around the lockdown to nonetheless educate their kids and poorer people.

HS: Yes. We should certainly track that. And I’m almost sure that what you’re hypothesizing is likely to be proven true, as is the wider impact on young people. I mean, we know from past economic crises that when you come out into a job market like the one we’re about to see, this lowers the long-term trajectory and has effects for really quite a long time on their lives.

DE: That’s the future. We’re still in the midst of the pandemic. Are there other ways social scientists can help immediately?

HS: Yes. So the British Academy, which is where I’m Chief Executive, we have set up a group of humanities and social scientists to help with this. So we’ve got lawyers, anthropologists, historians, economists, sociologists, behavioral scientists, and so on.

The group is going to do two things really. One is to provide a rapid response to government, where government is asking questions about issues. The obvious one right now is what does the next step in easing lockdown look like, as it were. But what we also want to do is look at some of the longer term questions that government may not have the bandwidth for.

I just mentioned the future of higher education, where we know that the funding model in the UK, which was based on international students, is likely to be taking a big hit. So how could that be changed? Or what’s the impact going to be on public services, and so on. So this is what our group is going to do to really put social science and humanities at the forefront of the response working with other disciplines.

DE: And are there some opportunities here that social science can play a role in? Our lives have all changed so dramatically, and it’s obvious that the future doesn’t have to be like the past. Are there ways that social scientists can reimagine how society can be reconstructed post-pandemic?

HS: Yes. I mean, this is a real opportunity. So social psychology suggests behavior change requires unfreezing existing behavior patterns before new patterns can be created. The reason that’s so difficult is so many of our behaviors are based on social norms. And so it’s very hard to do behavior change at an individual level.

And this is just one of those moments where actually so many of our behaviors have become unfrozen. And so there is a moment now where we can imagine different futures. I think the task for social scientists is not just to understand and explain, but also for social imagination. And if you look back at, for example, post the world wars, there was a great leveling of inequality, the creation of the welfare state.

I would be asking, can we reimagine our way to a more sustainable and fairer society, thinking about how we can improve well-being for all. We noticed from this that there are many people that we rely on but the economy doesn’t always value. People working in care, nurses, bus drivers. So could we build an economy that values them more? And this all sounds a bit utopian, and perhaps it won’t go anywhere, but it does seem to me to be a really important role for social scientists. And I think it’s worth a shot.

DE: Hetan Shah, thank you very much indeed.

HS: Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]

DE: Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE Publishing. For more interviews go to socialsciencespace.com.

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