Human behaviour: what scientists have learned about it from the pandemic

By Stephen Reicher, Bishop Wardlaw Professor in the School of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of St Andrews

During the pandemic, a lot of assumptions were made about how people behave. Many of those assumptions were wrong, and they led to disastrous policies.

Several governments worried that their pandemic restrictions would quickly lead to “behavioural fatigue” so that people would stop adhering to restrictions. In the UK, the prime minister’s former chief adviser Dominic Cummings recently admitted that this was the reason for not locking down the country sooner.

Meanwhile, former health secretary…

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