As of mid-March 2020, the United Kingdom’s strategy for battling the COVID-19 pandemic is markedly different from that of virtually every other Western country. While the UK government’s more relaxed policy is provoking controversy among scientists and policymakers around the world, there is a subtle irony that we should not lose amidst the chaos – in the face of scholarly criticism, the UK is now conducting the greatest social science experiment of all time.
The rationale for the UK government’s blueprint, which resists the more restrictive measures present in much of Europe – lockdowns, full quarantines, large-scale travel bans – stands out for two reasons. The first is the hotly contested idea of “herd immunity,” a medical concept concerning acquired social immunity to a disease once a certain threshold of the population has been infected and recovered. The debate on this is omnipresent in the media; no one without expertise in infectious diseases – myself included – is qualified to add to it.
The second reason is getting much less public attention but is no less fascinating. The strategy designed by Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty and Chief Scientific Advisor Sir Patrick Vallance is suffused with concerns about human behavior; for example, how long people can be expected to maintain extreme circumstances like isolation. In consultation with behavioral social scientists – widely known as the government’s “nudge unit” – the crisis management team has publicly stated that it is considering the social, economic, and psychological costs of implementing any plan of action. Although medical and life sciences are always present in any “evidence-based” discussion of the crisis, we would be remiss to ignore the role of social science in navigating our way through the storm.
Now, social science is clearly not as definitive as the natural sciences or life sciences. There are many more variables – people and societies are far more complex than hydrogen atoms – and the assumptions used to compensate for this are impossible to perfect. One of the biggest problems with practicing social science is the limits of experimentation. There are enormous challenges in designing and executing the experimental gold standard in other fields – the randomized controlled trial. Some are logistical; for example, it is impossible to re-run an election many times for the purposes of research. Some are ethical; an experimental treatment on crime prevention or early childhood education has enormously sensitive implications on real human beings.
Additionally, there is often a problem of external validity in assessing social science evidence. If we could have somehow run an experimental quarantine last year, before anyone had heard of COVID-19, there is no reason to think that the results without a genuine threat would hold in an actual pandemic situation. Nor would the results necessarily generalize across different economies, legal systems, and cultures.
Even with those caveats, social science is incredibly relevant to this crisis, warts and all. The question of costs and benefits is essential in determining any course of action. Although many people recoil at the idea of attempting to quantify the value of “unquantifiable” things about human life, many laws and regulations rely on an assessment of costs and benefits derived through the practice of social science – for example, the “price” of a tonne of carbon in the atmosphere or the “cost” of pain and suffering in a claim for damages.
Even if one takes issue with the nakedly utilitarian exercise of totalling up material losses and social anxiety and weighing them against lives – and this author certainly would – there is no question that economic depression also claims its fair share of victims. Indeed, perhaps the perfect ironic example of this is the teetering National Health Service, buffeted by cuts imposed by recession and austerity. Anyone who believes that more resources would allow the NHS to save more lives implicitly understands the necessity of considering the collateral economic damage of the pandemic. Theoretically then, there must be a point where the benefits of slowing COVID-19 are exceeded by the costs of the action required to achieve it. Granted – no one really knows where that line is, or on which side of it any current national plan lies. But action taken without at least some consideration of this fact is foolish. We must also consider that COVID-19 is not the last pandemic our globalized world will face. Any data that we can gather about human behavior from variations in our approach to combatting this virus will be invaluable in fighting the next.
This is obviously a situation in constant flux. The UK government could change its tack at any moment. Indeed, until recently it seemed that France would follow a similar strategy to the UK, only to reverse course with more stringent restrictions imposed this week. But since we know so little about the enemy we face, and the evidence we do have is imperfect, it makes plenty of intellectual sense that there would be some differentiation in the strategies nations adopt to fight it, even though – as seems to be the case – they are all grounded in evidence and sound moral logic.
We do not know if the UK’s approach will prove to be wise or not. There is no guaranteed outcome in zigging when everyone else zags; there are plenty of historical examples where an outlier proved to be a prideful fool, and there are many others where that outlier ended up a courageous victor. Of course, in any pandemic, medical and life sciences are the stars of the show, and they are likely to be decisive in the final aftermath. But in a crisis that demands we bring all our scientific and technical knowledge to bear on the problem, let us not leave the science of people and their behavior behind.