What Lindisfarne taught me about lockdown
About eight years ago I went to Lindisfarne. Not the 70s band, but the island, often referred to as Holy Island, just off the north east coast.
For those who don’t know, the island is connected to the mainland by two causeways and, between them, a bridge. The result is that, at each high tide, the island is cut off from the mainland. Time your journey wrong, and you’ll find yourself unavoidably detained by the North Sea.
My mission was, to say the least, unusual. At the time I clerked the Area Committee of Northumberland County Council, and both residents and the wider community had become concerned about the number of drivers who were getting stranded on the causeway.
I shouldn’t be flippant about being stranded. If you’re on the causeway and the water is too deep to get across the centre section, the only alternative is a wooden refuge tower that stands high about the road. It will keep you dry but you need to be nimble to get into it, and your car will remain on the causeway until the seawater claims it. My personal prize goes to the owner of an SUV that was written off after its engine inhaled seawater, who glumly told his rescuers ‘That doesn’t happen in the adverts.’ If there’s a medical reason why you can’t stay in the refuge hut until the tide recedes, then the only way of getting you out is either by lifeboat or helicopter.
What’s that got to do with lockdown?
An effective system of lockdown, or tiered restrictions, depends upon informed compliance. To achieve compliance everyone needs to know what the rules are, to understand the risks and harms involved in breaching them, including the sanctions. Any plan to stop drivers from driving into the north sea between Holy Island and Beal also depends upon informed compliance.
This comparison was inspired in part by the pictures, on social media, of visitors from Tier 4 areas in the UK travelling to South Wales to walk up Pen y Fan, the south of England and Wales’s highest mountain. Were they there because they didn’t know the rules, or because they didn’t care, or for some other reason? If you don’t know why individuals aren’t complying, then you can’t fix the problem. Uninformed non-compliance is not the same as wilful non-compliance, and the remedies may well be entirely different.
That’s why Lindisfarne / Holy Island came to mind. Were there aspects of the behaviours that led to cars being written off in the north sea, and their drivers having to be rescued, that might explain why hundreds of people who should never have left home ended up on the slopes of Pen y Fan?
There’s a spoiler here; we didn’t solve the problems of Holy Island. Visitors and delivery drivers continue to end up getting stranded on the causeway and bridge.
You might ask why. I certainly do every time I see a report in the paper of another stranding. So do the hundreds of people who comment vitriolically on social media. Those commentators repeat, almost to the point of distraction, the same solutions that have been canvassed repeatedly. Drivers should be fined. There should be barriers. There should be larger signs. Someone should build a proper bridge. The list goes on and on.
All the right things have been done though. All the messages and all the information you need to make a safe and dry journey to and from Holy Island is available out there. Amongst the possible explanations of why strandings still occur are, therefore, that drivers don’t go looking for information, don’t make effective appraisals of the risks involved, or simply think they are exempt from the risks and sanctions involved in ignoring the warnings.
Incidentally, in case you think Holy Island is an exceptional case, have a look on Youtube at the copious numbers of clips of footage of drivers running under or around the barriers at level crossings. It’s not just drivers of course — here’s a great newspaper article about cyclists doing the same thing during one of the sport’s monuments.
The relevance to the Pen y Fan pedestrians breaking the lockdown rule both in Wales and where they’ve come from is obvious. It’s not necessarily safe to assume they know what the rules are for other areas, and it’s not safe to assume they know how to make a decision about what’s the right thing to do, because we see plenty of cases on a mundane basis, outside of pandemics, of people failing to do precisely that.
We know from everyday experience that just giving individuals information about what they can or can’t do, or should or shouldn’t do, isn’t enough. We need to persuade them to seek out information, to weigh it carefully, and to decide what to do with a degree of seriousness.
There’s a balancing act to be performed any time you have these policy issues where you have to balance risk and sanctions. We’ve lived through one of those times, in the 1980s, when we had to deal with the public health crisis that was HIV / AIDS. However, I don’t think the lessons we learned then are necessarily transferable, because the GSRD communities who helped us reduce the transmission rates for HIV had a clear sense of themselves as communities, and acted in a way that epitomized enlightened self interest across the community.
We heard a lot, both from this government and its predecessors, back to 2010, about the impact and utility of behavioural science. There is no evidence, currently, of any input from behavioural science that has achieved anything i this pandemic. Instead there is a sense of a government overly wedded to one set of policy tools failing to understand the complexities of the ways in which people make decisions. I came across Stiglitz and Hoff’s model of the enculturated actor after doing some economic reading inspired by taking two of Marianna Mazzucatto’s books on holiday with me. It’s worth quoting Stiglitz and Hoff at length.
“ By the enculturated actor, we mean an actor whose preferences and cognition are subject to two social influences that go beyond the context of the moment of decision-making: (a) the social contexts to which the actor has become exposed and, especially accustomed; and (b) cultural mental models–including categories, narratives, and worldviews. We trace how these factors shape individuals’ behavior through the endogenous determination of both preferences and the lenses through which individuals see the world — their perception, categorization, and interpretation of situations.”
In a situation like the current one though, the enculturated actor is not just the subject of the decisions being made (as in, the driver who we want to prevent crossing the Holy Island causeway at high tide, or to stop going to Pen Y Fan in breach of regulations) but is also the decision maker.
It is hard not to conclude that, if this government continues to deliver policies on preventing the spread of disease that fail, it may be because they are not following the science, but rather their cultural mental models. Or to put it another way, if we seek better outcomes form the decisions government makes, we may need better ways of making those decisions so that the decisions are built on exogenous factors, such as evidence and science, and not the ‘preferences and the lenses through which individuals see the world’.
