A Level Economics: Can you change a Brexit state of mind?

If departing the EU has failed to deliver, why is the UK still so divided? Seven years on, we ask behavioural psychologists if cognitive dissonance can be overcome> Tim Adams in The Guardian


One of the most significant political events of the past few months, it has seemed to me, wasn’t strictly a bit of politics at all, but an emotional catch and quaver in the voice of a politician. The politician was the Conservative MP Steve Baker and the sudden sob in his throat came about during a TV interview about the efforts to resolve the Northern Ireland protocol.

Baker, you will recall, was one of the most strident voices in the Brexit argument, a leader of the Tory European Research group, the ERG, which frustrated Theresa May’s efforts to find a compromise deal with the EU. The sob in his voice and the tears in his eyes prefaced a short, heartfelt confession about the extreme private stress that those Brexit machinations – and subsequent arguments over Covid lockdown – had caused him. Speaking subsequently to the Times, Baker expanded on that state of mind. “I felt absolutely worthless,” he said. “I felt repugnant, hateful, to blame for all of the troubles that we had, absolutely without any joy, constantly worried about everything to the point of mental torment. A constant state of panic attacks and anxiety. It’s not a state anyone should live in.”

Matters came to a head in November 2021 at a weekly prayer group that Baker, a Christian, attended in Westminster. “I suddenly just started crying,” he recalled. “I couldn’t control it. I couldn’t speak. I was just clutching myself, sobbing my heart out.” One of the reasons that he was opening up about that now, he said, was that “I’m very conscious there’s lots of people out there who blame me for their misery. But it’s an unfortunate thing on this question of leave and remain that leaving has caused a great deal of anxiety and anger and depression for a lot of people. But being in the EU has caused a lot of anxiety and anger and depression for people…” 

Baker’s courageous candour was significant in our national conversation, it seemed to me, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, that outpouring was, to my knowledge, the only public occasion on which a leading Brexiter had owned up to the pain of doubt and anguish that the referendum had occasioned. It was, also, a very telling illustration of a truism about the whole ongoing cataclysm: that, though the vote obviously had fundamental real-world consequences for our economy and our politics, it was arguably best understood as a psychological rather a political moment.

From the outset, headline writers recognised and amplified the internalised crises behind the politics in references to “Brexhaustion”, “Strexit”, “Branxiety” and “Brexistential crisis”. The referendum result, then and now, was (for remainers) an act of visceral “self-harm”. In the days after the result, the Guardian reported that “therapists everywhere” were experiencing “shockingly elevated levels of anxiety and despair”, with mental health referrals “[starting] to mushroom”. There was a clear spike in the prescription of antidepressants. By January 2019, a YouGov survey found that two-thirds of British adults were either “fairly unhappy” or “very unhappy” because of Brexit; one-third of leave voters were in that latter category.
 
Seven years is sometimes thought of as a moment of settled change. It is understood, not quite exactly, as the period of time in which nearly all the cells in our bodies have been replaced. The Brexit-made divisions of 2016 persist, however. Though there is some anecdotal and polling evidence that there has been a shift in sentiment, and that remain might now prevail, the same polls show very little appetite to reopen the question. When the BBC did an anniversary Question Time in June, only one half of the divided nation was even allowed in the studio – the audience was made up entirely of those who voted leave, presumably to ensure the debate would not simply descend into an all-too familiar slanging match. (It was as if the marriage guidance counsellor had been forced to separate the warring parties outside.) If there is one certainty about the coming political conference season it is that considered arguments for and against Brexit will not be aired. The Tories will crow about Brexit being done. The Labour frontbench will solemnly observe that past tense, and avoid the B-word, as if it is a triggering trauma for the party and the country, best left undisturbed.

If the language of psychology and identity was always the lexicon with which we understood Brexit, the denialism of our current politics insists that it remains so. With this in mind, in the course of the past week, I have been speaking to some of the behavioural psychologists who initially examined some of the choices of the referendum, to see if they now saw any way out of current entrenched divisions. (One of the triggers for this inquiry in my own mind was reading a new book called The Art of the Impossible, the inside story of Nigel Farage’s short-lived Brexit party. Revisiting the ingrained anxieties of that period was a version of the addictive chest-tightening outrage that comes from a daily scroll through the culture war of my Twitter feed.)

One of the key mechanisms that all psychologists agree has defined the binary choice of the referendum is cognitive dissonance. That is the powerful internal mechanism in each of us that demands consistency in our understanding of the world, and which desperately looks for ways to correct or manage information that contradicts understanding. The term was coined by a young behaviouralist in the 1950s, Leon Festinger, who came to it after studying a religious doomsday cult that saw its date for apocalypse come and go. Cognitive dissonance described the jarring pain of cultists seeing prophecy unfulfilled and the immediate strategies to explain it away.
 

“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change,” Festinger wrote. “Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point. But suppose he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervour about convincing and converting other people to his view.” Welcome to Brexit.

The American social psychologist Carol Tavris has spent her academic career partly developing Festinger’s work. That wisdom is distilled in her book (co-written with Elliot Aronson) called, perfectly, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me). At the time of the Brexit referendum seven years ago, Tavris noted that “once we have made a decision, our mental doors tend to close… it is always easier to continue to justify a belief than to change it.” As a result, she suggested, Britain – like America under Trump – tribally divided, faced with all sorts of evidence that campaign promises were utter falsehoods, was “awash in dissonance”.

Little of that, Tavris suggested to me last week, has gone away. “Most of us tend to hold the belief that we are essentially good and moral and competent,” she says. “And if I fear I did something bad, foolish or wrong, that fear challenges that belief we hold about ourselves. Then I have a choice: either I can accept this new information and say, ‘I guess I really screwed up here’, or I can say, ‘Sod off with your stupid evidence’.” This latter response, she suggests, is the default. 

Her book uses a metaphor she calls the pyramid of choice. At the top of the pyramid, before a choice has been made, an individual is at his or her most open-minded. But as soon as you step off the top in a particular direction, efforts will already be being made to justify that decision. “By the time you’ve made five, or six or seven steps down that pyramid, renewing your commitment to that decision, rehearsing that decision, the harder it will be for anyone to go back up to the top.”

She points to lots of evidence that shows that even if people – judges for example - are given a face-saving way to declare they have got something wrong, they are still unlikely to accept or declare it.

So what kind of conversation helps people move past that dissonance and accept the evidence of reality (that, say, £350m won’t be given to the health service and there won’t be an easy trade deal with the US – or that Brexit is not to blame for every aspect of the cost of living crisis)?

“When we argue with somebody about their beliefs,” Tavris says, “the absolute crucial thing to avoid is making them feel foolish. If you say something like, ‘How could you be so stupid?’, that will almost always make your listener become even more committed to their belief. If you say instead, ‘Well, many of my own expectations turned out not to be the case too’, that might be a place to start.”

Psychologists are, of course, not immune to the biases they identify. How does she maintain doubt in her own beliefs? Well, she says, “it’s that old idea of being open-minded, but not so open that your brains fall out. You want to have ideas you live by and feel passionately about. But the goal is to hold them lightly enough so that [if the evidence changes] you can also let them go.”

The more I read into the science of psychological polarisation, the more often ideas of “neuropolitics” crop up. This is the fairly new science that examines – with the help of fMRI brain scans – questions of political allegiance in the context of brain structure and activity. Perhaps the leading researcher in this area in the UK is Darren Schreiber, at Essex University, author of the Your Brain Is Built for Politics. I call to ask him if the differences between “leaver” and “remainer” responses to the world are so baked in as to be visible in brain activity?

Schreiber is circumspect about the current reach of his discipline, beyond broad observations. “If you’re a conservative, or if you’re a liberal, there are consistent patterns that emerge,” he says. Different experiments in brain imaging “can classify political affiliation with about 70%-plus accuracy based on brain structure, and with brain activity at an even higher rate, 80%-plus”. In very simplified terms, the amygdala, the part of the brain that processes fear and threat, appears more sensitive to certain stimuli in republican or conservative brains.

Probably more significant, Schreiber suggests, is the fact that our brains are hardwired to be excited by politics in general.
Even raising the issue seems provocative. We just can’t talk about [Brexit] any moreNick Chater, behavioural scientist

“Though we all have these underlying predispositions at the genetic level, to be a little bit more conservative or a little bit more liberal, these can be altered by environmental circumstances. And by far the most important environmental circumstances, if you’re a human, is your social milieu. If you’re an ant you can tell who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’ with a very quick sniff. If you are a human it is more complex, and we put lot of work into that.”

That mental effort is subject to Hebb’s law, which holds that “neurons that fire together wire together”, that is to say, the brain itself starts to be shaped in tiny pathways by the associations it is most often exposed to, a sort of internal echo chamber.

How easy is it to change that wiring?

“It’s really hard,” Schreiber says. “We see tremendous stability over very long periods of time.” A choice like Brexit provides endless stimuli to feed that brain activity. “It’s coalitions within coalitions within coalitions…” Schreiber says.

Nick Chater, professor of behavioural science at Warwick Business School, approaches those stubborn social networks from a different perspective. In the aftermath of the referendum, he led a discussion on Radio 4’s The Human Zoo into the psychological fallout of Brexit, the hardening of decision into identity. He laughs a little when I ask him if there is any kind of time limit on cognitive dissonance.

“Behavioural psychology very rarely looks at the long term,” he says. “So I think actually, psychologists have fairly little idea how long these things tend to last.”

What he finds striking about the current situation is the almost total absence of debate about the effect of the decision itself. “It’s become so divisive, that even raising the issue seems almost a provocative act. There’s a sense that we just can’t talk about this at all any more.”

Does he see a strategy that would allow that to change?

“One of the things might change is if one could get to a point where we can reframe the debate. Say if the EU clearly broke into a two-speed Europe where there was a central core engaging in really deep integration and an outer rim more loosely connected…”

And what about the kind of language that might prompt a rethink?

“The most useful language would recognise that politics is inherently uncertain,” he says. “So: ‘We thought it would be a bad idea; you thought it would be better; but nobody really knew for sure. Now we know a bit more, and perhaps it’s time to rethink…’”

Does he hear much evidence of that?

“Not a great deal…”

Perhaps the most extensive examination of the referendum in these terms came in a book called The Psychology of Brexit, written by Brian Hughes, a specialist in stress psychophysiology and a professor of psychology at the University of Galway, Ireland. “Brexit,” Hughes argued, “emerged from psychological impulses, was determined by psychological choices, is construed in terms of psychological perceptions, and will leave a lasting psychological imprint.”

At the heart of the choice, Hughes suggested, were two persistent fallacies. First, the notion that people ever approach political questions with clear-headed reason. Second, the idea that your opponents have cornered the market in irrationality. “Remain did not have a monopoly on reason. This is because remainers are human beings.”
When you pathologise the other side, there’s no point in reaching out to themBrian Hughes, psychologist

Hughes’s book came out in 2019 at the height of “no deal is better than a bad deal” insanity. If he were to add to it now, he suggests, it would be as a textbook case of “polarisation theory” and the ways in which the three-word sloganeering of “Brexit means Brexit” and “get Brexit done” has been repurposed to provide the illusion of simplicity to other very complex issues – “stop the boats” etc. The primary division of Brexit has extended into “clusters of interwoven views” on the climate crisis, vaccination and immigration, feeding everything into the same blunt binary.

One result of that, he suggests, is that Brexit has become a classic example of toxicity. “If there is something especially scandalous in our own lives or traumatic, we will try not to mention it. It just brings too much up. People talk about the ‘Ming vase strategy’ for Labour and Brexit [the idea that they must not smash their precious majority]. The political logic is that this event was still so painful for people that you could lose half the electorate as a result of one soundbite.”

If there is a way through this, he suggests, it is to break down the myths of us and them. “Brexit was obviously never the single will of the people, but also the will of leavers and the will of remainers are very far from homogenous. Politicians need to find ways of foregrounding the diversity of views that people had and have, even if some of them might be very ugly. They need to show the illusion of simple polarisation.”

Preventing this, he says, is the fact that Brexit has brought into the political mainstream “all the reasoning errors that people make”. Polarity acts against nuance, and undermines the middle ground. “Both sides start to look at the other as somehow irretrievably deranged. And when you pathologise the other side, there’s no point in reaching out to them.” As a result, he suggests, “People who have the opportunity to address political challenges are no longer seeking to control the divisions in society, they are trying to maximise them for their own ends.”

Does he see an end to that polarity?

“It would require politicians and commentators to take some of the heat out of the arguments,” he says. “That might take a generation, or it might be one of these cyclical trends.” For the time being, our Brexity brains are it seems here to stay.

A Level Economics 12: Rational Actor

Explain the assumption of a rational actor. Do consumers or firms live up to this assumption?

The assumption of a rational actor, also known as the rationality assumption, is a foundational principle in economics. It posits that individuals, consumers, or firms make decisions based on rational behavior to maximize their self-interest and achieve their objectives.

According to the rational actor assumption:

1. Consistent Preferences: Rational actors have well-defined and consistent preferences. They have a clear understanding of their needs and desires and can rank different options or outcomes based on their preferences.

2. Cost-Benefit Analysis: Rational actors engage in cost-benefit analysis when making decisions. They assess the costs and benefits associated with various choices and select the option that maximizes their overall satisfaction or utility.

3. Optimization: Rational actors strive to optimize their decision-making. They make choices that provide the highest possible benefit or utility given their available resources and constraints.

While the assumption of a rational actor provides a useful framework for economic analysis, it is important to recognize that in real-world situations, individuals and firms may not always perfectly adhere to the assumptions of rationality.

In the case of consumers, there are several factors that can influence their decision-making and deviate from perfect rationality:

1. Limited Information: Consumers may have limited information or imperfect knowledge about products, prices, or market conditions, leading to decisions that are not fully rational or optimized.

2. Behavioral Biases: Consumers can be influenced by behavioral biases, such as heuristics, social norms, emotions, or cognitive biases, which may lead to decisions that deviate from strict rationality.

3. Time Constraints: Consumers may face time constraints or cognitive limitations, making it difficult to thoroughly analyze all available options and make fully rational choices.

Regarding firms, while they are often assumed to be profit-maximizing rational actors, their decision-making can also deviate from perfect rationality due to various factors:

1. Managerial Discretion: Firms may be influenced by managerial discretion, where managers' personal goals, biases, or organizational constraints can affect decision-making, potentially deviating from strict profit maximization.

2. Incomplete Information: Firms may have incomplete information about market conditions, competitor behavior, or future uncertainties, leading to decisions that are based on imperfect knowledge rather than perfect rationality.

3. Organizational Considerations: Firms may also consider factors beyond profit maximization, such as corporate social responsibility, ethical considerations, or long-term sustainability, which may influence decision-making and deviate from strict rationality.

In summary, while the assumption of a rational actor provides a useful framework for economic analysis, individuals, consumers, and firms may not always fully live up to the assumption of perfect rationality. Factors such as limited information, behavioral biases, time constraints, managerial discretion, and organizational considerations can influence decision-making and lead to deviations from strict rationality in real-world economic behavior.

Fallacies of Capitalism 7: The Rational Actor Fallacy

How does the "rational economic actor" fallacy overlook the role of cognitive biases, imperfect information, and bounded rationality in decision-making within a capitalist system? 

The "rational economic actor" fallacy assumes that individuals in a capitalist system always make decisions in a perfectly rational and self-interested manner. However, this belief overlooks the influence of cognitive biases, imperfect information, and bounded rationality, which can lead to suboptimal decision-making. Let's understand this concept with simple examples:

1. Cognitive biases: Humans are prone to cognitive biases, which are systematic errors in thinking that affect decision-making. For example, the availability bias occurs when people rely on easily accessible information rather than considering a broader range of data. In a capitalist system, this bias can lead individuals to make decisions based on recent news or vivid examples rather than carefully analyzing all relevant information. This can result in suboptimal choices, such as investing in trendy but risky assets without considering their long-term potential.

2. Imperfect information: In many economic transactions, individuals do not have access to complete and accurate information. For instance, when buying a used car, the seller may withhold information about the vehicle's hidden problems. This information asymmetry can lead to suboptimal decisions. Buyers, lacking complete knowledge, may overpay for a faulty car. In a capitalist system, imperfect information can distort market outcomes and hinder individuals from making fully rational choices.

3. Bounded rationality: Bounded rationality recognizes that individuals have limited cognitive abilities to process information and make complex decisions. People often rely on simplifying heuristics and rules of thumb instead of undertaking thorough analysis. For example, when choosing a product, individuals may rely on brand reputation rather than researching all available options. In a capitalist system, bounded rationality can lead individuals to make decisions based on incomplete information or superficial analysis, resulting in suboptimal outcomes.

4. Emotional influences: Human decision-making is also influenced by emotions, which can deviate from strict rationality. For example, investors may be driven by fear or greed during market fluctuations, leading to irrational investment decisions. In a capitalist system, emotional biases can contribute to market volatility and inefficient allocation of resources.

5. Social influences: People's decisions are often influenced by social factors, such as peer pressure or social norms, which may override individual rationality. For instance, individuals may conform to popular trends or engage in conspicuous consumption to fit into a particular social group. In a capitalist system, social influences can drive individuals to make choices that prioritize social acceptance over their own best interests.

In summary, the "rational economic actor" fallacy overlooks the role of cognitive biases, imperfect information, bounded rationality, emotional influences, and social factors in decision-making within a capitalist system. Recognizing these limitations is crucial for understanding that individuals do not always act in perfectly rational and self-interested ways. Policymakers and market participants should consider these factors to design regulations, incentives, and interventions that account for the complexity of human decision-making and promote better outcomes in the capitalist system.

Yearning for the Miracle Man

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn


After rough weather and stormy seas battered the country for three quarters of a century, a nation adrift saw two miracle men arise. Separated by 50 years and endowed with magical personalities, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Imran Khan set the public imagination on fire by challenging the established order.

After Bhutto was sent to the gallows, many PPP jiyalas self-flagellated, with several immolating themselves in despair. Till their fiery end, they believed in a feudal lord’s promise of socialist utopia. Similar horrific scenes occurred after the assassination of his charismatic daughter. That the father was instrumental in the break-up of Pakistan, and that during the daughter’s years Pakistan fell yet deeper into a pit of corruption, left jiyalas unfazed. Today’s Sindh remains firmly in the grip of a quasi-feudal dynasty and the Bhutto cult.

But still worse might lie ahead as Imran Khan’s cult goes from strength to strength. Writing in Dawn, Adrian Husain worries that a matinee idol with a freshly acquired messianic status is skillfully exploiting widespread anger at corruption to sow hate and division among Pakistanis. Fahd Husain evinces alarm that PTI’s flag-waving ‘youthias’ can see no wrong in whatever Khan says or does. He wonders why even those with Ivy League degrees put their rational faculties into deep sleep. Conversing with PTI supporters, says Ayesha Khan, has become close to impossible.

What enabled these two men to command the senseless devotion of so many millions? Can science explain it? Forget political science. The dark secret is that this isn’t really a science. So, could neuroscience give the answer? Although this area has seen spectacular progress, it is nowhere close to cracking the brain’s inner code.

Instead one must turn to the animal kingdom. Gregariousness and suppression of individuality helps protect members of a species because leaders give direction in a difficult environment. But there is a downside. Herds of sheep are known to follow their leader over a cliff and self-destruct. Human groupies have done similarly.

Specific social attitudes — groupthink and its diametrical opposite, scepticism — explain why some societies crave messiahs while others don’t. At one level, everyone is a sceptic. When it comes to everyday life — where to invest one’s life’s savings, what food to eat, or which doctor to see for a serious health problem — we don’t simply believe all that’s told to us. Instead, we look around for evidence and are willing to let go of ideas when contrary evidence piles up. But in political and religious matters, open-mindedness often turns into absolutism.

Absolutism has made Pakistani politics less and less issue-oriented and more and more tribal. It is hard to tell apart PML-N or PPP from PTI on substantive matters such as the economy, foreign debt, or relations with neighbouring countries. The only certainty is that the government in power will blame the previous government for everything.

This absolutism makes most party supporters purely partisan — you are with us or against us. Zealots willingly believe accusations aimed at the other side but dismiss those aimed at their own. A rational PTI supporter, on the other hand, will entertain the Toshakhana as possible evidence of wrongdoing just as much as Surrey Palace or Avenfield Apartments. He is also willing to admit that all Pakistani political leaders — including Khan — have lifestyles at odds with their declared assets and income. Rational supporters who can say ‘yeh sub chor hain’ exist but are few.

Instead, a culture of intellectual laziness feeds upon wild conspiracy theories coupled with unshakeable belief that political destinies are controlled by some overarching, external power. The ancient Greeks believed that the world was run by the whims and desires of the great god Zeus. For the PTI zealot, the centre of the universe has shifted from Mount Olympus to Washington.

In the zealot’s imagination, an omnipotent American god sits in the White House. With just the flick of his wrist, he ordered Imran Khan’s (former) military sponsors to dump him and then stitched together his fractured political opposition into organising a no-confidence vote. Of course, everyone dutifully obeyed orders. And this supposedly happened inside one of the world’s most anti-American countries! But we know that pigs can fly, don’t we? (Incidentally, America’s severest critic for over 60 years, Noam Chomsky, has reportedly trashed Khan’s claim of a regime change conspiracy.)

Fortunately, not all who stand with a political party, PTI included, are zealots. They do recognise that the country’s entire political class is crass, corrupt, self-seeking, and puts personal interest above that of the electorate. Knowing this they choose a party that, in their estimation, is a lesser evil over a greater one. Democracy depends on this vital principle.

To see this, compare the mass hysteria generated by Khan after being voted out of office with the calmness that followed France’s recent elections. Though despised by the majority of those who voted for him, Macron won handsomely over Marie Le Pen, his far-right, Islamophobic opponent. To her credit, Le Pen did not attribute the defeat either to Washington or to a global Islamic conspiracy. That’s civilised politics.

Why democracy works for France but has had such a rough time in Pakistan is easy to see. It’s not just the military and its constant meddling in political affairs. More important is a culture where emotion and dogma shove truth into the margins. What else explains the enormous popularity of motivational speakers who lecture engineering students on methods to deal with jinns and other supernatural creatures?

Pakistan’s education system stresses faith-unity-discipline at the cost of reason-diversity-liberty. This has seriously impaired the ordinary Pakistani’s capacity to judge. Even in private English-medium schools for the elite, teachers and students remain shackled to a madressah mindset. Why be surprised that so many ‘youthias’ are burger bachas? Unless we allow children to think, the yearning for Miracle Man will continue. It will long outlast Imran Khan — whenever and however he finally exits the scene.

Politics is highly personalised

 

How Brahmins can regain Leadership of India

 

Facts v feelings: how to stop our emotions misleading us

The pandemic has shown how a lack of solid statistics can be dangerous. But even with the firmest of evidence, we often end up ignoring the facts we don’t like. By Tim Harford in The Guardian
 

By the spring of 2020, the high stakes involved in rigorous, timely and honest statistics had suddenly become all too clear. A new coronavirus was sweeping the world. Politicians had to make their most consequential decisions in decades, and fast. Many of those decisions depended on data detective work that epidemiologists, medical statisticians and economists were scrambling to conduct. Tens of millions of lives were potentially at risk. So were billions of people’s livelihoods.

In early April, countries around the world were a couple of weeks into lockdown, global deaths passed 60,000, and it was far from clear how the story would unfold. Perhaps the deepest economic depression since the 1930s was on its way, on the back of a mushrooming death toll. Perhaps, thanks to human ingenuity or good fortune, such apocalyptic fears would fade from memory. Many scenarios seemed plausible. And that’s the problem.

An epidemiologist, John Ioannidis, wrote in mid-March that Covid-19 “might be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco”. The data detectives are doing their best – but they’re having to work with data that’s patchy, inconsistent and woefully inadequate for making life-and-death decisions with the confidence we would like.

Details of this fiasco will, no doubt, be studied for years to come. But some things already seem clear. At the beginning of the crisis, politics seem to have impeded the free flow of honest statistics. Although the claim is contested, Taiwan complained that in late December 2019 it had given important clues about human-to-human transmission to the World Health Organization – but as late as mid-January, the WHO was reassuringly tweeting that China had found no evidence of human-to-human transmission. (Taiwan is not a member of the WHO, because China claims sovereignty over the territory and demands that it should not be treated as an independent state. It’s possible that this geopolitical obstacle led to the alleged delay.)

Did this matter? Almost certainly; with cases doubling every two or three days, we will never know what might have been different with an extra couple of weeks of warning. It’s clear that many leaders took a while to appreciate the potential gravity of the threat. President Trump, for instance, announced in late February: “It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” Four weeks later, with 1,300 Americans dead and more confirmed cases in the US than any other country, Trump was still talking hopefully about getting everybody to church at Easter.

As I write, debates are raging. Can rapid testing, isolation and contact tracing contain outbreaks indefinitely, or merely delay their spread? Should we worry more about small indoor gatherings or large outdoor ones? Does closing schools help to prevent the spread of the virus, or do more harm as children go to stay with vulnerable grandparents? How much does wearing masks help? These and many other questions can be answered only by good data about who has been infected, and when.

But in the early months of the pandemic, a vast number of infections were not being registered in official statistics, owing to a lack of tests. And the tests that were being conducted were giving a skewed picture, being focused on medical staff, critically ill patients, and – let’s face it – rich, famous people. It took several months to build a picture of how many mild or asymptomatic cases there are, and hence how deadly the virus really is. As the death toll rose exponentially in March, doubling every two days in the UK, there was no time to wait and see. Leaders put economies into an induced coma – more than 3 million Americans filed jobless claims in a single week in late March, five times the previous record. The following week was even worse: more than 6.5m claims were filed. Were the potential health consequences really catastrophic enough to justify sweeping away so many people’s incomes? It seemed so – but epidemiologists could only make their best guesses with very limited information.

It’s hard to imagine a more extraordinary illustration of how much we usually take accurate, systematically gathered numbers for granted. The statistics for a huge range of important issues that predate the coronavirus have been painstakingly assembled over the years by diligent statisticians, and often made available to download, free of charge, anywhere in the world. Yet we are spoiled by such luxury, casually dismissing “lies, damned lies and statistics”. The case of Covid-19 reminds us how desperate the situation can become when the statistics simply aren’t there.

When it comes to interpreting the world around us, we need to realise that our feelings can trump our expertise. This explains why we buy things we don’t need, fall for the wrong kind of romantic partner, or vote for politicians who betray our trust. In particular, it explains why we so often buy into statistical claims that even a moment’s thought would tell us cannot be true. Sometimes, we want to be fooled.

Psychologist Ziva Kunda found this effect in the lab, when she showed experimental subjects an article laying out the evidence that coffee or other sources of caffeine could increase the risk to women of developing breast cysts. Most people found the article pretty convincing. Women who drank a lot of coffee did not.

We often find ways to dismiss evidence that we don’t like. And the opposite is true, too: when evidence seems to support our preconceptions, we are less likely to look too closely for flaws. It is not easy to master our emotions while assessing information that matters to us, not least because our emotions can lead us astray in different directions.

We don’t need to become emotionless processors of numerical information – just noticing our emotions and taking them into account may often be enough to improve our judgment. Rather than requiring superhuman control of our emotions, we need simply to develop good habits. Ask yourself: how does this information make me feel? Do I feel vindicated or smug? Anxious, angry or afraid? Am I in denial, scrambling to find a reason to dismiss the claim?

In the early days of the coronavirus epidemic, helpful-seeming misinformation spread even faster than the virus itself. One viral post – circulating on Facebook and email newsgroups – all-too-confidently explained how to distinguish between Covid-19 and a cold, reassured people that the virus was destroyed by warm weather, and incorrectly advised that iced water was to be avoided, while warm water kills any virus. The post, sometimes attributed to “my friend’s uncle”, sometimes to “Stanford hospital board” or some blameless and uninvolved paediatrician, was occasionally accurate but generally speculative and misleading. But still people – normally sensible people – shared it again and again and again. Why? Because they wanted to help others. They felt confused, they saw apparently useful advice, and they felt impelled to share. That impulse was only human, and it was well-meaning – but it was not wise.

Protestors in Edinburgh demonstrating against Covid-19 prevention measures. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Before I repeat any statistical claim, I first try to take note of how it makes me feel. It’s not a foolproof method against tricking myself, but it’s a habit that does little harm, and is sometimes a great deal of help. Our emotions are powerful. We can’t make them vanish, and nor should we want to. But we can, and should, try to notice when they are clouding our judgment.

In 1997, the economists Linda Babcock and George Loewenstein ran an experiment in which participants were given evidence from a real court case about a motorbike accident. They were then randomly assigned to play the role of plaintiff’s attorney (arguing that the injured motorcyclist should receive $100,000 in damages) or defence attorney (arguing that the case should be dismissed or the damages should be low).

The experimental subjects were given a financial incentive to argue their side of the case persuasively, and to reach an advantageous settlement with the other side. They were also given a separate financial incentive to accurately guess what the damages the judge in the real case had actually awarded. Their predictions should have been unrelated to their role-playing, but their judgment was strongly influenced by what they hoped would be true.

Psychologists call this “motivated reasoning”. Motivated reasoning is thinking through a topic with the aim, conscious or unconscious, of reaching a particular kind of conclusion. In a football game, we see the fouls committed by the other team but overlook the sins of our own side. We are more likely to notice what we want to notice. Experts are not immune to motivated reasoning. Under some circumstances their expertise can even become a disadvantage. The French satirist Molière once wrote: “A learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant one.” Benjamin Franklin commented: “So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables us to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to.”

Modern social science agrees with Molière and Franklin: people with deeper expertise are better equipped to spot deception, but if they fall into the trap of motivated reasoning, they are able to muster more reasons to believe whatever they really wish to believe.

One recent review of the evidence concluded that this tendency to evaluate evidence and test arguments in a way that is biased towards our own preconceptions is not only common, but just as common among intelligent people. Being smart or educated is no defence. In some circumstances, it may even be a weakness.

One illustration of this is a study published in 2006 by two political scientists, Charles Taber and Milton Lodge. They wanted to examine the way Americans reasoned about controversial political issues. The two they chose were gun control and affirmative action.

Taber and Lodge asked their experimental participants to read a number of arguments on either side, and to evaluate the strength and weakness of each argument. One might hope that being asked to review these pros and cons might give people more of a shared appreciation of opposing viewpoints; instead, the new information pulled people further apart.

This was because people mined the information they were given for ways to support their existing beliefs. When invited to search for more information, people would seek out data that backed their preconceived ideas. When invited to assess the strength of an opposing argument, they would spend considerable time thinking up ways to shoot it down.

This isn’t the only study to reach this sort of conclusion, but what’s particularly intriguing about Taber and Lodge’s experiment is that expertise made matters worse. More sophisticated participants in the experiment found more material to back up their preconceptions. More surprisingly, they found less material that contradicted them – as though they were using their expertise actively to avoid uncomfortable information. They produced more arguments in favour of their own views, and picked up more flaws in the other side’s arguments. They were vastly better equipped to reach the conclusion they had wanted to reach all along.

Of all the emotional responses we might have, the most politically relevant are motivated by partisanship. People with a strong political affiliation want to be on the right side of things. We see a claim, and our response is immediately shaped by whether we believe “that’s what people like me think”.

Consider this claim about climate change: “Human activity is causing the Earth’s climate to warm up, posing serious risks to our way of life.” Many of us have an emotional reaction to a claim like that; it’s not like a claim about the distance to Mars. Believing it or denying it is part of our identity; it says something about who we are, who our friends are, and the sort of world we want to live in. If I put a claim about climate change in a news headline, or in a graph designed to be shared on social media, it will attract attention and engagement not because it is true or false, but because of the way people feel about it.

If you doubt this, ponder the findings of a Gallup poll conducted in 2015. It found a huge gap between how much Democrats and Republicans in the US worried about climate change. What rational reason could there be for that?

Scientific evidence is scientific evidence. Our beliefs around climate change shouldn’t skew left and right. But they do. This gap became wider the more education people had. Among those with no college education, 45% of Democrats and 23% of Republicans worried “a great deal” about climate change. Yet among those with a college education, the figures were 50% of Democrats and 8% of Republicans. A similar pattern holds if you measure scientific literacy: more scientifically literate Republicans and Democrats are further apart than those who know very little about science.

If emotion didn’t come into it, surely more education and more information would help people to come to an agreement about what the truth is – or at least, the current best theory? But giving people more information seems actively to polarise them on the question of climate change. This fact alone tells us how important our emotions are. People are straining to reach the conclusion that fits with their other beliefs and values – and the more they know, the more ammunition they have to reach the conclusion they hope to reach.

Anti-carbon tax protesters in Australia in 2011. Photograph: Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images

In the case of climate change, there is an objective truth, even if we are unable to discern it with perfect certainty. But as you are one individual among nearly 8 billion on the planet, the environmental consequences of what you happen to think are irrelevant. With a handful of exceptions – say, if you’re the president of China – climate change is going to take its course regardless of what you say or do. From a self-centred point of view, the practical cost of being wrong is close to zero. The social consequences of your beliefs, however, are real and immediate.

Imagine that you’re a barley farmer in Montana, and hot, dry summers are ruining your crop with increasing frequency. Climate change matters to you. And yet rural Montana is a conservative place, and the words “climate change” are politically charged. Anyway, what can you personally do about it?

Here’s how one farmer, Erik Somerfeld, threads that needle, as described by the journalist Ari LeVaux: “In the field, looking at his withering crop, Somerfeld was unequivocal about the cause of his damaged crop – ‘climate change’. But back at the bar, with his friends, his language changed. He dropped those taboo words in favour of ‘erratic weather’ and ‘drier, hotter summers’ – a not-uncommon conversational tactic in farm country these days.”

If Somerfeld lived in Portland, Oregon, or Brighton, East Sussex, he wouldn’t need to be so circumspect at his local tavern – he’d be likely to have friends who took climate change very seriously indeed. But then those friends would quickly ostracise someone else in the social group who went around loudly claiming that climate change is a Chinese hoax.

So perhaps it is not so surprising after all to find educated Americans poles apart on the topic of climate change. Hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution have wired us to care deeply about fitting in with those around us. This helps to explain the findings of Taber and Lodge that better-informed people are actually more at risk of motivated reasoning on politically partisan topics: the more persuasively we can make the case for what our friends already believe, the more our friends will respect us.

It’s far easier to lead ourselves astray when the practical consequences of being wrong are small or non-existent, while the social consequences of being “wrong” are severe. It’s no coincidence that this describes many controversies that divide along partisan lines.

It’s tempting to assume that motivated reasoning is just something that happens to other people. I have political principles; you’re politically biased; he’s a fringe conspiracy theorist. But we would be wiser to acknowledge that we all think with our hearts rather than our heads sometimes.

Kris De Meyer, a neuroscientist at King’s College, London, shows his students a message describing an environmental activist’s problem with climate change denialism:


To summarise the climate deniers’ activities, I think we can say that:

(1) Their efforts have been aggressive while ours have been defensive.

(2) The deniers’ activities are rather orderly – almost as if they had a plan working for them.

I think the denialist forces can be characterised as dedicated opportunists. They are quick to act and seem to be totally unprincipled in the type of information they use to attack the scientific community. There is no question, though, that we have been inept in getting our side of the story, good though it may be, across to the news media and the public.

The students, all committed believers in climate change, outraged at the smokescreen laid down by the cynical and anti-scientific deniers, nod in recognition. Then De Meyer reveals the source of the text. It’s not a recent email. It’s taken, sometimes word for word, from an infamous internal memo written by a cigarette marketing executive in 1968. The memo is complaining not about “climate deniers” but about “anti-cigarette forces”, but otherwise, few changes were required.

You can use the same language, the same arguments, and perhaps even have the same conviction that you’re right, whether you’re arguing (rightly) that climate change is real or (wrongly) that the cigarette-cancer link is not.

(Here’s an example of this tendency that, for personal reasons, I can’t help but be sensitive about. My left-leaning, environmentally conscious friends are justifiably critical of ad hominem attacks on climate scientists. You know the kind of thing: claims that scientists are inventing data because of their political biases, or because they’re scrambling for funding from big government. In short, smearing the person rather than engaging with the evidence.

Yet the same friends are happy to embrace and amplify the same kind of tactics when they are used to attack my fellow economists: that we are inventing data because of our political biases, or scrambling for funding from big business. I tried to point out the parallel to one thoughtful person, and got nowhere. She was completely unable to comprehend what I was talking about. I’d call this a double standard, but that would be unfair – it would suggest that it was deliberate. It’s not. It’s an unconscious bias that’s easy to see in others and very hard to see in ourselves.)

Our emotional reaction to a statistical or scientific claim isn’t a side issue. Our emotions can, and often do, shape our beliefs more than any logic. We are capable of persuading ourselves to believe strange things, and to doubt solid evidence, in service of our political partisanship, our desire to keep drinking coffee, our unwillingness to face up to the reality of our HIV diagnosis, or any other cause that invokes an emotional response.

But we shouldn’t despair. We can learn to control our emotions – that is part of the process of growing up. The first simple step is to notice those emotions. When you see a statistical claim, pay attention to your own reaction. If you feel outrage, triumph, denial, pause for a moment. Then reflect. You don’t need to be an emotionless robot, but you could and should think as well as feel.

Most of us do not actively wish to delude ourselves, even when that might be socially advantageous. We have motives to reach certain conclusions, but facts matter, too. Lots of people would like to be movie stars, billionaires or immune to hangovers, but very few people believe that they actually are. Wishful thinking has limits. The more we get into the habit of counting to three and noticing our knee-jerk reactions, the closer to the truth we are likely to get.

For example, one survey, conducted by a team of academics, found that most people were perfectly able to distinguish serious journalism from fake news, and also agreed that it was important to amplify the truth, not lies. Yet the same people would happily share headlines such as “Over 500 ‘Migrant Caravaners’ Arrested With Suicide Vests”, because at the moment at which they clicked “share”, they weren’t stopping to think. They weren’t thinking, “Is this true?”, and they weren’t thinking, “Do I think the truth is important?” 

Instead, as they skimmed the internet in that state of constant distraction that we all recognise, they were carried away with their emotions and their partisanship. The good news is that simply pausing for a moment to reflect was all it took to filter out a lot of the misinformation. It doesn’t take much; we can all do it. All we need to do is acquire the habit of stopping to think.

Inflammatory memes or tub-thumping speeches invite us to leap to the wrong conclusion without thinking. That’s why we need to be calm. And that is also why so much persuasion is designed to arouse us – our lust, our desire, our sympathy or our anger. When was the last time Donald Trump, or for that matter Greenpeace, tweeted something designed to make you pause in calm reflection? Today’s persuaders don’t want you to stop and think. They want you to hurry up and feel. Don’t be rushed.

The agony of weekend loneliness: ‘I won't speak to another human until Monday’

For growing numbers of people the weekend is an emotional wilderness where interaction is minimal and social life non-existent. What can be done to break this toxic cycle asks Paula Cocozza in The Guardian?

On Saturday morning, Peter got up and went to the supermarket. He carried his shopping home, and took care of his laundry and ironing. In the afternoon, he browsed a few record stores and later he cooked himself dinner; always something adventurous on a Saturday night. Afterwards, he hit Netflix. And in all those hours, in common with many of Peter’s Saturdays, not to mention his Sundays, he had no meaningful interaction with another human being. “The only person I spoke to,” he says, “was the lady who came over to verify my bottles of beer at the supermarket self-checkout.”

During the week, Peter, 62, is too busy to be lonely. His commute from Brighton to London means that his working life is “a tunnel” he enters on a Monday and from which no daylight is glimpsed until Friday. But just when Peter re-emerges, he is stymied by an overwhelming sense of loneliness. Instead of providing respite from the stress of office life, a chance to reconnect with family and friends, the weekend looms as a vast emotional and social wilderness that must be traversed before work takes hold again.


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Peter dreads the weekend. But he is far from alone in this. He is one of nearly 200 respondents, from Falmouth to Jakarta, who replied to a request on the Guardian’s website for readers to share their experience of weekend loneliness. The youngest respondent was 16; the eldest in her 70s, and between them, the pain and isolation recurred in countless iterations.

Despite all this, the phenomenon of weekend loneliness has scarcely been studied. “It’s not something that’s been researched at all,” says Pamela Qualter, professor of psychology for education at the University of Manchester. She led the BBC’s Loneliness Experiment last year, and “found that there didn’t seem to be a time of day [nor] a season when people felt especially lonely. But we didn’t ask about the weekend.” So what does weekend loneliness look like, who experiences it – and what might be done to alleviate it?

“We define loneliness as the difference between the desire or expectation of what life should be like, and the reality,” says Kellie Payne, research and policy manager at the Campaign to End Loneliness. For those who experience loneliness primarily – or only – at the weekend, this painful discrepancy is intensified by the sense of being at odds not only with the world outside the door, but with one’s capable, sociable weekday self.

A personal, internal division emerges. Liz is 41, with a rewarding job and family nearby – but she is living two lives. “In the week, I am a contented, fulfilled person. At the weekend, I feel like a lonely outcast,” she says. Increasingly, she finds herself out of step with her social group where she lives in Somerset. She runs her own training business from home, so weekdays are busy. But this is exactly when her married friends want to meet for coffee “and a moan about their husbands”.

Liz would like to see these friends at the weekend, too, but when Saturday comes, “it’s unsaid – but it’s like they’ve closed the doors to me. Weekends are for couples. It would be unheard of to invite me to a dinner party, because I’m single,” she says. “I wake up on a Saturday and feel down. It’s a struggle to pull myself out of bed if I have nothing planned.” When Monday dawns, “it is always a relief”.

For Liz, the loneliness of the weekend is exacerbated by an additional, painful sense that she is not only alone but locked out – “banned from the weekend”, as she puts it. Between Monday and Friday, she enjoys her neighbourhood, but at the weekend, the streets and parks seem to transform. They become questioning, forbidding, to the extent that Liz wonders if she has “absorbed” her loneliness from her environment, now full of couples, families, groups.

“What’s interesting to me is that I’ll sit on my own in a cafe easily in the week,” she says. But the same cafe at the weekend is a space she cannot enter. Even walking the dog takes on a different cast. “I don’t feel conscious at all during the week” – but on a Sunday morning, the same walk feels acutely sad.

“As psychologists we talk about the looking-glass self,” Qualter says. “How your feelings about yourself are influenced by how you think others see you. The public space changes, becomes occupied by other people … It’s no longer your space. You feel uncomfortable because you don’t fit.”

“I hear this a lot,” says Sally Brown, a life coach and counsellor. “It’s like people have two personas. The weekday persona is busy and confident. But the weekend persona is lost and vulnerable.”

But is Liz really projecting her loneliness on to others, and imagining the way they see her – or does society read people who are alone in too predictable a manner? Peter believes he passes through his Brighton weekends undisturbed because he is regarded as a harmless eccentric. “The bachelor is something of a social misfit, but an acceptable one,” he remarks.

A person who enters a public space alone will often be read as best left alone. Mark is 32 and recently returned to London after a couple of years travelling. Going to the pub to watch football one weekend, he took a seat at an empty table for six. Quickly the pub filled. But Mark sat alone and undisturbed for 20 minutes before anyone asked if they could take one of the five free seats around him. “I guess they think you are going to be bringing extra people, or you’re weird,” he says wryly.

Brown, who sees many clients in their 30s and 40s, thinks this disconnect is “related to those transitional times when your peer group may have moved on to a stage you haven’t yet reached”. And, of course, may not wish to reach. Mark’s friends, like Liz’s, are mostly in relationships. “It can happen really fast. All of a sudden, your group isn’t there any more. You are second-tier friendship, relegated to week nights. You’re not in the couples’ dinner party or playdate scene. You start to lack confidence in connecting, so hesitate to suggest things. You assume you are not welcome at the weekend and withdraw … It becomes a toxic circle.”

Brown’s belief that loneliness at the weekend arises out of life’s transitions resonates with Kate. At 61, hers is a different kind of shift to Mark’s or Liz’s. Kate sees herself moving “from motherhood to single life again”. She uses the word “transition”, especially when she reminds herself, while she sits alone on Saturday nights, that she has raised her girls well, that the loneliness is just another challenge to overcome.

Kate, who lives in Cardiff, has two grown daughters whom she raised alone. Her weeks are busy with work and friends, and sometimes her children, if they happen to be nearby. But her weekends, like Peter’s, are “very long and quiet … I will not use my voice or speak with another human until Monday.”

For Kate, the silence of the weekend is wrapped in another sort of silence. She cannot speak of her loneliness to anyone, least of all her children.

“They would be devastated,” she says. “In a way, promoting their education, encouraging them to be social and confident … That has been to the detriment of me. The more they achieve, the further from home they have moved. But I wouldn’t change it, because it was my duty as a mother.”

Seven times during the course of an hour-and-a-half’s conversation, Kate worries that sharing her loneliness with her children would “burden” them. The word feels heavier each time it lands.

While silence protects her daughters, and preserves their sense of Kate, and Kate’s sense of herself, as “strong and capable, someone they can talk to”, it compounds her remoteness. Although she exchanges WhatsApp messages with both children every weekend, these seem to make no impact on Kate’s underlying isolation.
FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘The idea of being retired is horrific – then all days will be like weekends.’ Illustration: Monika Jurczyk/The Guardian

She has a “wonderful relationship” with both daughters, but their closeness makes the pain worse – because how can they not see?

I wonder if Kate’s daughters ever ask her what she did at the weekend, and Kate says she has been wondering about this, too. They don’t. “At some level – not consciously – they are worried about the answer.” In the meantime, her children’s absence weighs “like a bereavement” and the loneliness hits hardest at certain predictable moments.

Just as Peter sits down to his adventurous dinner, picks up his cutlery and feels instantly lonely – despite his efforts in the kitchen – so Kate reels from her plate.

She is at the opposite end of the culinary spectrum to Peter. “One of my favourite go-to meals is a couple of boiled eggs and a piece of toast,” she says. It’s a classic comfort meal that Kate routinely enjoys. But last weekend, she sat down, cracked open the egg, “and I thought: ‘I can’t do it.’ I have had that meal so many times, I just couldn’t eat it.” She threw the food into the bin.

Kate is approaching retirement. “But the idea of being retired is horrific – because all the days will be like weekends.” So what can she, or anyone, do to try to stem their weekend loneliness?

Sarah, who is 44 and lives in Surrey, asks herself this very question. “What can you do to alleviate your loneliness? We’re all struggling. Everyone I know has less money to spend.” She, too, is a single parent; and as her daughter, 18, becomes more independent, Sarah feels increasingly lonely at weekends. “What exacerbates the loneliness is that I’m a very sociable person,” she says.

To counter this, she keeps herself in a state of perpetual readiness for last-minute invitations. “It’s good to be seen as someone who will say yes – because you get asked again. I’ve been very lucky to be an emergency plus-one in quite a few situations,” Sarah says. She is aware that this won’t sound lucky to everyone.

She has filled in for her best friend on a trip with her friend’s husband to Secret Cinema. And she has made up the numbers at a wedding. “There is a kind of currency to being a couple,” she says. “That’s the word I want to use – a currency that makes couples worth more in social situations.” (Conversely, of course, the cost of living is lower for them, too.) So does being available at the last minute represent a kind of personal devaluation?

“I think that’s fair to say,” she says. “I’d much rather be turning up with someone. But I really appreciate it when I’m included. I love it. I think it’s important to be the person who says: ‘Yes, sure, I can sit next to whoever.’”

Sarah and I are speaking on a Saturday afternoon. If she were not talking to me, she says, she would be writing an email or doing housework. She has a natural positivity and a bright voice that belie the sadness she feels on her most solitary weekends. If her daughter goes to university next year, the weekends, and weekdays, will further quieten. Like Kate and Peter, Sarah is conscious of the life change that looms.

So she is quietly hatching plans – to move, maybe, depending on her daughter’s movements. And in the meantime, she offers to babysit for friends, hopes for a leisure revolution for single people, and says yes to as many invitations as possible.

“It comes down to keeping the communication lines open, and initiating,” Brown, the life coach, says. Some of her clients have resolved their divided lives by adding structure to their weekends. Loneliness creates passivity in friendships, Brown warns. “There is a sense of ‘I can’t make this happen … It has got to happen to me’”, which can make people who are lonely less inclined to make an effort.

With some clients, Brown has mapped on paper their social circles and groups. “It’s amazing how many people they come up with.” Others’ “proactive approach” include cultivating regular haunts (because being among fellow regulars can feel a bit like being among friends) and attending groups or clubs through the website Meetup.

“That journey can involve some extra loneliness if you find a group you don’t fit with,” Brown warns. I think of Peter, who dropped out of a walking group after a woman berated him for describing himself as “a sad old bachelor”. (“You mustn’t say that,” she told him. “You must say you’re alone and happy.”) Or Kate, waiting for her children to ask what she did at the weekend. Or Mark, who sometimes finds Meetups “a group of lonely, desperate guys”.

“It’s about keeping going,” Brown advises. “If after two weeks you’re not connecting, move on.” Loneliness is complex, she notes. “It can impact those who crave time to themselves after a week at work”; a double bind in which company is both a salve and an impediment.

Peter, for instance, used to volunteer, but, he says, “it cut into what little weekend time I had”, which makes me suspect that as well as hankering for connection, he also cherishes his time alone. “People talk about the difference between being alone and being lonely,” he says. “I am slap bang in the middle of that.”

Meanwhile, Kate is thinking of fostering children. When Peter retires, he might travel the UK and explore a new culinary continent: veganism. Liz has been broadening her group of friends, “meeting new people who aren’t so stuck in the couple thing”. Mark is considering a move to a livelier part of London. And Sarah reminds herself, on her loneliest Saturday evenings, when no last-minute invitations materialise, “to look at all the positives. It’s really hard, but try to embrace the aloneness, the solitude.”