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“When you create a state of confusion, people become ever more reliant on the messaging,” Dodsworth says. “Instead of feeling confident about making decisions, they end up waiting for instructions from the Government”

This week’s chaotic and contradictory advice on travel is all part of the growing use of fear to control the public, she believes.

A tactic which has been supercharged by the Covid pandemic. "It’s like a torture scenario”

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Dodsworth shares her belief that the technique “infantilises” the public and enables the Government to control behaviour without having to use unpopular legislation.

Such as making holidays illegal

It may at first glance have the feel of a conspiracy theory.... But Dodsworth's says her research is evidence of the industrial-scale use of behavioural science in Whitehall, but also spoken to practitioners who believe it has gone way too far

Dodsworth speaks on "a much needed conversation about the use of fear, not just in the epidemic, but the way we use behavioural psychology overall. "It’s very much how the Government now does business. "It’s the business of fear”

Dodsworth research started after being struck by a now-infamous minute of a Sage meeting last March.

It noted that a sub-group of Sage warned that people “still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened” and “the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased”

Dodsworth's book A State of Fear, claims that there are behavioural insights teams operating within at least 10 Government departments. Her research has made her deeply suspicious of even the most innocent-looking good news story about the Government

With the success of the vaccine rollout and the decline in Covid deaths, the Government might have been expected to quietly dial down its use of fear.

@BareReality

believes it is as prevalent as ever. “The Cabinet Office is recruiting 3 new behavioural scientists this week”

Dodsworth accepts that for many people, desperate times call for desperate measures, and some will feel the use of fear was entirely justified.

But what she can’t accept is that fear has been used to control the behaviour of the British people without consent

'Fear creates collateral damage...

'We’ve tanked the economy

'People have lost their jobs

'Businesses have closed

'1/8 adults have developed depression 'I think there were a lot of problems with the politics of fear... fundamentally, I think it undermines democracy'

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How have we got here? “We want to be quiet and to be good and to do the right thing. "The herd mentality has been really encouraged through the use of behavioural psychology," says Dodsworth