As we enter a second lockdown in the UK, the issue in everybody’s mind is whether people will comply.

After all, you can close the workplaces and the shops and the pubs all you like, but if people then congregate and socialise and drink in their homes, then you are simply wasting your time.

And, as we ponder this issue, we are reverting to the questions that fatally delayed the first lockdown. Do people lack the grit to stick with it? Or will fatigue take over?

But as Thomas Pynchon once observed, if you get people asking the wrong questions, you don’t need to worry about the answers. And the reason why these questions are wrong is that they presuppose that the problem – and also what differs between March and November – lies within the individual.

But of far greater significance is what is happening – and has changed – between individuals (who are asked to abide by restrictions) and the government (which is imposing them).

At the UK level, there has been a profound shift in the relationship between the government and the people. Confidence in the Government has fallen from a little above 70% in April to around 30% today.

Now, the relationship between factors like confidence and trust, on the one hand, and compliance on the other is not straightforward. It is clearer in some areas, like getting tested and providing your contacts, which involve engaging with authority, than in others, such as maintaining distance and reducing contacts, which don’t.

Moreover, some people may comply despite, not because of the government. Nonetheless, in overall terms it is clear that confidence and trust is critical if people are to abide by Covid regulations.  So, the loss of trust is bad news in terms of controlling the pandemic. Can that trust be regained?

In order to understand how to win trust back it is helpful to examine how it was lost. And here one event clearly stands out. In late May, following Dominic Cummings’ trip from London to Durham there was a precipitous drop in the trust ratings of Johnson and his UK government (though not in the devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales).

The reason why this event was so corrosive was not so much to do with what Cummings had done as the fact that it was defended – and even praised – by the prime minister and other members of his cabinet.

This gave rise to a strong sense of “one law for them (the Government) and another for us (the public)”.

This incident, and its effects, reflects a broad psychological literature on the influence of leaders and compliance with authorities. The key point is that people will trust leaders and authorities and go along with them to the extent that they are seen as being of “us” and acting for “us”. So how do leaders have to act in order to gain our trust? In a phrase, treat the public like a partner: listen to us, respond to our concerns, respect us, be open and honest with us. 

If the Cummings debacle is a particularly egregious example of breaking down any sense of “being in this together”, the real problem lies much more in the many mundane ways in which government has related to the public during the pandemic.

Paternalism has trumped partnership. Johnson and his ministers have treated us as errant children who are to blame for breaking rules and allowing infections to spike. They have lectured and hectored us, informing us that it is our duty to do the right thing, and they have threatened us with punishment if we do the wrong thing. 

By acting in these various ways, the government continue to position themselves as other to us, and hence lead us equally to position them as other. So bang goes partnership, trust and adherence.

Through their actions, the government violates one of the first rules of social influence: you rarely inspire people to act by talking down to them. Rather, people will listen to you to the extent that you show yourself to be on their side. You achieve traction more through what you do than what you say.

To be more concrete, the government must stop seeing compliance in terms of a civic duty and more in terms of a civic contract: let them concentrate less on what we need to do and more on what they need to do themselves: to provide a functional testing system, to support the public to abide by restrictions, to create safe environments for where we work and relax.

If the government takes its own responsibility to support us seriously then they are in a better position when it comes to asking us to take our responsibilities seriously (as indeed we must to control the spread of infection).

In the midst of the greatest crisis of our generation, we need a leadership to unite us and rally us. For that, we need a government we can trust – and right now we don’t have one.

The good news is that trust can be regained as well as lost. But for that to happen there must be a radical reset of the way they relate to the public – as radical as the reset needed in our testing system to make that work too, and just as important.

Stephen Reicher is Wardlaw Professor of Psychology at the University of St. Andrews and member of Independent SAGE.

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