Halloween, Health, and the Behavioural Immune System
Eight minute read
The Kid and the Id
We all love Halloween - a seasonal celebration that turns childhood fantasies of ghosts, ghouls, and monsters into door-to-door cosplay. Inner visions of ancient threats to life and limb are let out on a long leash of imitation and mockery. As a plus, the kids are rewarded with candy. How great is that?
Halloween seems a right time to talk about the “behavourial immune system.”
The hypothesized behavioural immune system “consists of a suite of psychological mechanisms that (a) detect cues connoting the presence of infectious pathogens in the immediate environment, (b) trigger disease-relevant emotional and cognitive responses, and thus (c) facilitate behavioral avoidance of pathogen infection.”
Let’s unpack that.
A developing physical immune system learns to make a distinction between ‘self’ and ‘other’ - what’s you and what isn’t. The body learns to recognize toxicity through a complex suite of responses that maintain internal integrity.
Germs and parasites have to get into our bodies to infect us, and once they do a protracted and possibly deadly conflict may result through inflammation. It makes sense there would have been an evolutionary payoff for the hominid brain to evolve a parallel behavioural immunity, to avoid such invisible threats by recognizing their marks in the external environment.
Whereas the immune sytem is reactive, the behavioural immune system is proactive. And it’s driver is the feeling of disgust.
Disgust comes up spontaneously when we see or smell fecal matter, a dead animal or a filthy living space. In other words, things that naturally may be vectors for pathogens and parasites. This feeling would have evolved to include other hominids who looked ill or were behaving strangely.
Tens of thousands of years age, people of different appearance who came from afar - and who might look otherwise healthy - might also precipitate a similar feeling of unease, and for a simple reason. Distant populations that have never been in close contact host entirely different parasites and pathogens, which they have adapted to but might represent a health risk to those without any resistance.
So yes, there may even be an evolutionary foundation for xenophobia.
In any case, Halloween isn’t just for kids anymore. As adults, we find representations of zombies and other infectious-looking ghouls delightfully entertaining, because they push those archaic buttons of disgust and fear in an entirely safe and distanced manner. Yet those buttons can also be pressed for purposes other than entertainment. The Id in the big kid can always be gamed.
Terror Management
One of the greatest threats to our sense of meaning is entirely unavoidable: death. According to Terror Management Theory, human beings are in a state of conflict, sometimes conscious but mostly unconscious, between their instinct for self-preservation and the knowledge of their finite existence. Hence religion, tribalism, and other social systems that attempt to resolve or at least reduce this tension.
According to TMT, people need to insulate themselves from their deep fear of living an insignificant life destined to be erased by death. One path to address this fear is to assure themselves that they are part of an important group. This desire to reinforce cultural significance in the face of death often results in displays of prejudice based on the belief that the group with which one identifies is superior to others. In this way, people confirm their self-importance, at least to themselves.
Hang on to that thought about one group being superior to another. It will come up later when I talk about ‘othering.’
For a great many people, nothing has been more frightening over the past two years than the possibility of falling ill and dying from COVID-19. You can certainly make the argument that it’s necessary to scare people into safe behaviour when a pandemic is in play. Yet early on, a growing volume of scientific information indicated that the risk from COVID-19 was being leveraged into a threat unsupported by the data (a small sampling here, here and here. As for the supposed solution, here).
In her recent book State of Fear, British photographer and journalist Laura Dodsworth describes how the UK government worked on ensuring mass compliance in an emerging pandemic. “The behavioural scientists advising the government said that a substantial number of people did not feel threatened enough by Covid-19 to follow the rules. They advised the government to increase our sense of ‘personal threat’, to scare us into submission,” she writes.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s circle took advice from five behavourial insights teams, including the 77th Brigade, an army unit combining media and psychological operations. (Interesting that the British Army was in on the programming. Another point to remember.)
One of the five teams was the Independent Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (SPI-B), a sub-group of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). SPI-B’s was tasked to provide “behavioural science advice aimed at anticipating and helping people adhere to interventions that are recommended by medical or epidemiological experts.”
In 2010, UK prime mister David Cameron set up the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), unofficially known as the Nudge Unit. BIT became central during the pandemic in using techniques of mass persuasion on the British Public.
In a July 2021 review of Dodsworth’s book, Anna Farrow points out that a pre-pandemic “nudge” might be something as mundane as a “prompt to eat our five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, reduce food waste, or submit our taxes on time.” With the pandemic, the behavioural science advisors recommended influencing mass behaviour in more forceful ways. On March 23, a 2020 discussion paper presented to the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group had this to say: “The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.” Within months we began to see more inflammatory language from government and media to target the complacent and noncompliant.
BIT has expanded into a private transnational company with offices in the U.S., France, Australia, and Canada. Our country not only hosts a BIT office in Toronto, it has masters of mass persuasion at the very core of government, Farrow observes:
Dr. Teresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, had referenced a behavioural insight team located within the Privy Council Office. It is called the Impact and Innovation Unit and was set up in 2017. The Star’s Susan Delacourt remarks that the role the Impact Unit played in Canada’s Covid messaging is a “social-science experiment,” one that “may have given government clues on how to modify citizen’s behaviour for other big global issues – such as climate change, for instance.”
In Britain, as in Canada and other jurisdictions, “two weeks to flatten the curve” was an easy sell to the vast majority of citizens in 2020. The short, sharply-defined timeline didn’t represent a hardship for most. Yet disruptive new demands soon followed, which only increased in length and severity - restrictions on movements, shuttered stores and churches, lengthy isolation at home, and eventually vaccine mandates. And compliance was achieved through campaigns of fear.
There’s no way of knowing how much UK and Canadian government advisors explicitly weaponized the concepts of the behavioural immune system or terror management theory. But they certainly exploited earlier findings of behavioural psychology for mass manipulation. Because that was their job.
If Dodsworth’s revelations aren’t spooky enough, The Ottawa Citizen recently revealed that Canada mirrored Britain with its own military intelligence unit involved in COVID-related propaganda operations.
The above plan never saw the light of day. When briefed about the information operations campaign, Chief of the Defence Staff General Jon Vance ordered it stopped.
Astoundingly, the quashed propaganda campaign was neither requested by the federal government nor approved by cabinet. “CJOC claimed the information operations scheme was needed to head off civil disobedience by Canadians during the coronavirus pandemic and to bolster government messages about the pandemic.”
As the subhead of the Ottawa Citizen story puts it, the plan “relied on propaganda techniques similar to those employed during the Afghanistan war.”
A separate initiative, not linked to the CJOC plan, but overseen by Canadian Forces intelligence officers, culled information from public social media accounts in Ontario. Data was also compiled on peaceful Black Lives Matter gatherings and BLM leaders. Senior military officers claimed that information was needed to ensure the success of Operation Laser, the Canadian Forces mission to help out in long-term care homes hit by COVID-19 and to aid in the distribution of vaccines in some northern communities.
- David Pugliese, The Ottawa Citizen
In the same story, the Citizen reported that the Canadian Forces launched an investigation into a September 2020 incident “when military information operations staff forged a letter from the Nova Scotia government warning about wolves on the loose in a particular region of the province.”
Huh?
The letter was disseminated to locals, who made panicked calls to government officials who were unaware the military was behind the deception. “The investigation determined the reservists conducting the operation lacked formal training and policies governing the use of propaganda techniques were not well understood by the soldiers.”
Why would a Canadian army unit be engaging in a deception exercise involving wolves at a time when the primary public fear involved infectious disease? Guess it all comes down to a problem with poorly-trained reservists. Always up to kids’ stuff. That must be it.
Halloween indeed. And of course, the corporate media continues to play its own role in leveraging fear and disgust as revenue-friendly clickbait.
Working the Rheostat
Over the past two years, governments on both side of the Atlantic have been taking their cues from experts skilled in the dark arts of behavioural psychology, working our lizard brains like stage magicians. The behavioural goalposts have proved as moveable as chess pieces - even those involving empathy and heroism. At the outset of the pandemic, front line health workers were celebrated in mass weekly rituals of banging of pots and pans. A little under two years later, some of those very health care workers who have rejected a vaccine mandate (the very professionals with the best knowledge and real-world experience of the relative risk of vaccines versus Covid-19) have been dismissed literally and figuratively by their employers, and demonized by media and government alike. They’ve gone from heroes to zeros, from trust to disgust. That’s some kind of mass behavioural shaping.
In State of Fear, Laura Dodsworth presciently predicted that the unvaccinated would be targeted as “reckless, socially irresponsible or stupid.” Scientific research contradicts the ubiquitous media messaging that vaccine holdouts are Delta superspreaders (see here and here, and a media acknowledgement here), but science is irrelevant in a witchhunt.
To give one example close to home, after a handful of concerned parents showed up at a Salmon Arm school in British Columbia to oppose a pop-up vaccine clinic that appeared unannounced on the school’s premises, with several entering to deliver a ‘notice of liability,’ BC public safety minister Mike Farnsworth took to the airwaves. “It’s disgraceful and completely unacceptable what these covidiots did,” he said. Rather comically, a local news clip pronounced that it was “still unclear what their intentions might have been.”
Words have effects, and the language to describe the unvaccinated is becoming progressively more inflammatory. Historically, the most effective way to demonize a group of people has been to leverage the behavioural immune system with the language of deadly contagion. In the mid-nineties war in Balkans, Serbians took to identifying Croats as real-world “vampires.” During the Rwanda genocide in 1994, the Hutu branded the Tutsi as “cockroaches.” And of course, in Nazi-controlled Germany, “filthy” Jews were painted as vectors of disease, little better than “vermin.”
We’d all like to believe this tragic form of psychosocial manipulation based on vectors of disease is a thing of the 20th century past, but it seems it’s still a useful a useful tool in the 21st. (During UK’s 2016 Brexit debacle, signs reportedly urged, “Leave the E. U. No more Polish vermin.”) You may say, ‘come on, don’t be ridiculous, the COVID situation isn‘t remotely comparable, even at the level of language.’ Let’s hope you’re right, although the difference is one of degree, not of kind. The language of ‘othering’ is on a rheostat, and the current of hate is always variable.
The Choice
“To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.”
― Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety. 1947
Society is now fracturing into opposing sides, with many convinced they are the claimants of both absolute scientific truth and the moral high ground on matters of life and death. We’ve seen this movie before - and it doesn’t end well before the credits roll. Corporate media has leveraged and heightened this divide with the lazy binary of “vaxxer/anti-vaxxer,” when the situation is, as most situations are, more nuanced and complicated. (Many of the most prominent scientific critics of mRNA injections are also vaccine proponents.)
The social engineers haven’t just planted a flag into our heads - they’ve set up shop in our hearts, to flog fear and disgust. To see this colonization in others is a cinch. To see it oneself is much harder - and I’m no different. Self-questioning is never easy, but on this matter I see fear and disgust being much directed much more in one direction than the other.
This Halloween we should all be asking ourselves, what is it that’s really spooking ourselves and our kids? (Hint: it’s not wolves.)
As in all times in history, the most revolutionary act is to reject division and send hate packing, and to recognize and respect others as autonomous beings, free to choose their own paths and beliefs. To see that blinkered, disgusting other as a Thou.
“It’s a simple choice, right now, between fear and love,” said the American comic Bill Hicks in one of his last routines, echoing Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Gandhi, and Christ. “The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one.”
Yes - A brilliant piece. And I love the photo at the end. Vaccinated holding hands with Unvaccinated. Beautiful!
Thank you so much, Monika and Linda. Spent a lot of time on this one!