While India revels in the IPL, do we care about the mental health of cricketers?

Varun Shetty in Cricinfo

For 15 minutes, in the frigid press-conference room of the Holkar Stadium in Indore last November, Virat Kohli fielded questions mostly about the pink-ball Test in Kolkata nine days later. That was until he got one about Glenn Maxwell's decision to take a break from cricket to tend to his mental health.

"I'm absolutely for it," Kohli said. "I've gone through a phase in my career where I felt like it was the end of the world. In England 2014, I didn't know what to do, what to say to anyone, and how to speak and how to communicate. And to be honest, I couldn't have said I'm not feeling great mentally and I need to get away from the game. Because you never know how that's taken."

Kohli was 25 in 2014, an international player for six years, and long past the stage of just being an exciting prospect; he was a generational talent being groomed for leadership, and whose brandification had already transitioned him into the elite tier of Indian cricket. With no one to talk to, ten innings without a fifty felt like the end of the world.

The press conference wasn't a setting in which Kohli could have elaborated further on his thoughts about that tour. But whether his malaise was existential, performance-related, or even a symptom of mental illness, it provides a sombre insight into the contrast between cricket's profile in India and the negligible support system for its players.

Playing cricket in India is different to elsewhere in the world, not least because of a population approaching 1.4 billion. The margins for error are small, and nowhere else are the rewards of making it so lucrative, all of which thrusts the player into an unhealthy relationship with a demanding public. And though the phenomenon of stoning players' houses may have disappeared, it might be only because coordinated bullying on social media is easier to sustain.

Not that it should take such a reality to build a support system, as other cricketing nations have shown. Dr Samir Parikh, a psychiatrist and director of Fortis' National Mental Health Program, said one in four people suffer from mental health issues.

"If you have a hundred players that play for, let's say, a year, it is not possible that at least one or two will not have depression," he told the Cricket Monthly. "It's just statistically not possible. So how do you identify and take care of it? Because you might misread the lows, misread the reaction, as a part of the career, not as a medical problem."

Robin Uthappa has spoken recently about being clinically depressed around the late 2000s Jasjeet Plaha / © Hindustan Times/Getty Images

It stands to reason that self-reporting is the most reliable way to start tackling any such problems.

"If you think that a player is important enough, for the team or for Indian cricket to go forward, I think they should be looked after," Kohli said as part of his response to the Maxwell question. "When you get to the international stage, every player needs that communication, that ability to just speak out."

But if Kohli couldn't, then who can?

Amonth after Kohli's press conference, Madhya Pradesh batsman Aryaman Birla, 22 at the time, announced an indefinite break from the game as he had been coping with "severe anxiety related to the sport for a while now".

It was a rare public statement of the kind by a cricketer in India, perhaps the first. More cricketers have spoken of their experiences since. Recently, in separate interviews, Robin Uthappa said he had been clinically depressed and suicidal between 2009 and 2011 - not long after becoming a T20 World Cup winner. It had been especially difficult to manage when there was no cricket.

"Cricket kept my mind off of these thoughts but it became really difficult on non-match days and during the off season," Uthappa said on a wellness webinar hosted by the Royals. "On days I would just be sitting there and would think to myself on the count of three, I'm going to run and jump off of the balcony. But something kind of just held me back."

Uthappa's situation gives us a glimpse into how franchise cricket has added a new dimension to cricketers' lives. As a tournament that seems, paradoxically, both accessible and difficult to break into - 971 players registered for the last auction - the IPL has a certain amount of influence over players' destinies.

Psychiatrist Samir Parikh: "If I was working with a young sportsperson who is doing well, I would put all my might into grounding them into focusing on performance, shutting the noise of adulation, not looking at your bank balance, and focusing on the next ball" Ryan Pierse / © Getty Images

A few weeks ago, Chennai Super Kings owner N Srinivasan was quoted as saying that Suresh Raina, second only to MS Dhoni in the CSK pantheon, would "certainly realise what he is missing and certainly all the money he is going to lose" by opting out of the IPL. There's an immediate parallel in football, where Lionel Messi, synonymous with Barcelona FC, had to consider suing the club he has been at since he was 13 when he wanted to leave, and was all but coerced into staying on for another year. The commodification of players is a modern challenge - and may affect those who are biochemically predisposed to mental conditions.

For Uthappa, a last-minute trade to his home-town franchise, the Royal Challengers Bangalore, was unsettling enough to exacerbate an underlying illness.

"In 2008 I played for Mumbai Indians and I was just transferred to the RCB," Uthappa told the Quint. "I was very conflicted because the trade happened very close to the tournament. I think three-four weeks before. Suddenly, you're preparing the whole year to play for one team and you're thrown into a trade situation when you have to go to another team. Even though I was coming home [Bengaluru], I was very conflicted. And I think that was the hay that broke the camel's back, so to speak, for me. I realised something was not right. I was constantly depressed, I was not okay."

Uthappa reached out to a counsellor and was diagnosed. He then had to stick to a counselling routine, and was on medication as he navigated his illness, with his family as support system.

In a 2013 thesis on suicides in cricket at the University of Chester, Shaun McNee scraped international cricketers' autobiographies for quotes on the emotional toll of the cricketing life. In it are excerpts from players like Herschelle Gibbs, Marcus Trescothick and Andrew Flintoff on the strains of touring, of developing "four-wall fever" in hotel rooms, of returning home and not being recognised by their children. Professional cricket gets lonely.

Sheldon Jackson, Saurashtra's senior pro, was homesick at the start of the last Ranji Trophy season, as his team's first two fixtures were away. It had been a difficult year for the 33-year-old, one where he'd needed to be in "three-four places at the same time", apart from dealing with his frustration at not being called up to the India A squad. His mother had battled tuberculosis, and he was aching to be home with his wife, who was pregnant with their first child.

Sheldon Jackson didn't seek professional help for his mental-health troubles but managed to play through the phase Prashant Bhoot / © Sportzpics

"I was not sleeping well," Jackson told TCM. "Whatever was going on on the field, I was not enjoying it a bit. It was always like, jaldi khatam ho jaye, mujhe ghar jaana hai [I hope this ends early, I want to be home]. I tried to speak to certain people but instead of trying to understand from where you're coming, people always try to be the stronger person. Ki nahin yaar, aisa nahi hai [It's not a big deal], be strong, we are this, we are that. But actually at the end of the day we are just humans. We may be cricketers but we are humans first."

Jackson played through his discomfort, coping by keeping himself occupied and in the gym, while those at home reassured him that things were under control. He had another stellar season, breaching the 800-run mark once again as Saurashtra won the Ranji Trophy. During this time he only spoke to one of his team-mates, Chirag Jani, whom he has known a long time, and didn't seek professional help because, as he put it, "I hadn't gone into mental trauma or something".

Former India batsman Aakash Chopra, now a broadcaster, says things were much the same when he was an active cricketer: there was "no way" you could tell a captain or coach if you were feeling down, because you would be benched. "By the time you reach the top level, you're already hardwired to not acknowledge or admit if you're having certain issues," Chopra told TCM.

He makes an important distinction between the challenge of having to hold on to a spot in the team, and having to battle mental-health issues. The former is part of the game, wherever it is played, and something players train to manage as they step up through the ranks. The average cricketer already knows that the odds of success are stacked against them. A bad day at a trial or a bad decision from an umpire can end careers, and there are no second chances. Chopra was hearing he was going to be dropped even as he prepared to make his debut for Delhi.

Chopra says he first began to feel lonely and disconnected from the game after he was dropped from the Indian team. As he looked to navigate that period, he was too conscious to be open about it; and that included self-judgement about whether being a recent Indian player had changed how he behaves. He contemplated leaving cricket, before trying counselling and an Art of Living course to ground himself.

"For those who start doing well, the sheer expectation also has a huge impact," says Parikh. "Anything which happens in the public domain brings a lot more expectation, which exaggerates everything about the failure. So that makes it even more difficult, especially when you are younger. And the same stress comes back when you're not young anymore. The moment you're established and become slightly more senior, you know there is someone knocking on the door."


Hotel rooms are mostly lonely places, and living out of a suitcase can take a mental toll Ryan Pierse / © Getty Images

"The nature of cricket is such that it tears at the nerves," cricket writer David Frith said to the Guardian in a 2001 article about suicides in English cricket. "Half-hearted cricketers are extremely rare. This game gets a grip on people such as only religious fanatics might recognise."

For an aspirational generation of Indian cricketers, growing up on broadcasts flavoured by machismo and one-upmanship, the pressure of expectation is bound to rise.

In the present circumstances there are fresh challenges. In the ongoing IPL, even as cricket-starved audiences tune in to watch on television, the players perform in empty stadiums and live in biosecure bubbles. "There are a number of other players who are very much in the same boat as Suresh Raina, and I just hope that the teams are aware of that and are catering for that," mental-conditioning coach Paddy Upton told ESPNcricinfo a fortnight before the tournament began. "There are coaches who are gonna be struggling, there are support staff who are gonna be struggling in that three-month bio-bubble."

The work before the team management, according to Upton, is "to understand who are the extroverts, the confidence players, the externally motivated players, those who are risk-averse, those who are fear-based, the pessimists. Those are the players we really need to nurture to bring them up to a place where they can be comfortable in their own lives, comfortable by themselves in their hotel rooms without that external validation and stimulation…"

IPL games and international matches are the most high-profile of India's cricket, but they are only a small proportion of it. In the 2019-20 season, India held 2036 domestic matches across men's and women's cricket and age groups. For that volume of cricket, and cricketers, the support system that currently exists barely qualifies as an afterthought.

In thinking about why the BCCI hasn't matched up with Australia and England on mental-well-being measures, one must consider the spectrum of opinions that Indian society holds on the topic. From a legal lens, attempting suicide was punishable under criminal law in India until 2017, when that provision of the penal code was restricted (but not removed altogether). A 2018 document floated in the Indian parliament said there are only 3827 psychiatrists in the country, against a requirement of 13,500.

A future archive of prime-time TV news since June 2020 will be filled with popular anchors trying to talk down any mention of mental illness in the case of Sushant Singh Rajput - the actor who played Dhoni in a biopic - who died by suicide. Some segments have gone as far as analysing his smiles in old footage to "prove" that he could not have been depressed; adding to that narrative, some celebrities with big followings have dismissed mental illnesses as a conspiracy or a hoax.

In the early '90s, when former India wicketkeeper Sadanand Viswanath was dealing with the death of his parents within a year of each other, the end of his Indian career, and a subsequent battle with alcoholism and depression - all in a short period of time - he considered seeing a psychiatrist. His friend, a doctor, intervened.

"I did seriously consider that option," Viswanath told TCM. "Until one fine day a friend of mine who is a doctor said, 'Vishy, even if there's nothing wrong with you, once you finish those sessions of counselling with a psychiatrist, you'll be bonkers. Better not see any psychiatrist.'"

Viswanath said he considers it one of the best pieces of advice he was given at the time.

"Ultimately your mental strength and your bouncing-back ability and your resilience, your perseverance, that gumption, that gut feel - it all depends on your self-respect, your belief system and not wanting to cut a sorry figure in society. Because you have played for the Indian team. That's the maryaad [conduct] one must have. When I walk up, people should say, 'Wow, here's a former Indian cricketer.' If you see me in a sorry state of affairs, what's that going to reflect on Indian cricket? Indian cricket becomes the loser. I don't want that to happen."

The likelihood of, say, depressive symptoms being categorised as "negative thinking" are strong even today. In the age of motivational coaches, genuine medical issues may inadvertently get overlooked.

"The mental-health component, which is the more biological component, by and large is very neglected, and that's why some of the recent [player] breaks have happened," Parikh reckons. "Those breaks could well have been a pure mental-health issue and not merely a burnout. We don't know from a distance."


The IPL, with its big-money auctions, has had a significant impact on players' prospects, and that has brought pressure in its wake Kalpak Pathak / © Hindustan Times/Getty Images

The Indian men's team has, from time to time, employed mental-conditioning coaches. The women's team, on the other hand, has been publicly - and unsuccessfully - asking for a sports psychologist since the end of the 2016 T20 World Cup. The absence of one has meant that the burden of dealing with issues as varied as anxiety, depression and eating disorders have fallen on the players themselves, alongside support staff hired for other roles.

As far as TCM could determine, the only formal initiative taken at board level has been the creation of a general player's handbook in 2017, based on the recommendation of the Mudgal committee, which was set up to look into various aspects of Indian cricket. The handbook - adapted for cricket by GoSports Foundation, who originally created it for athlete awareness around things like sponsorships and the media - contains a section on mental well-being in a 101 format; it informs players about the symptoms of mental illness and recommends steps on dealing with them, including advice to seek professional help. It is understood that copies of this handbook were published in English and Hindi, but several players - domestic and international - told TCM they had never heard of it.

In summary, the pattern that emerges is that players at various levels are either not being heard, or are wary of speaking about their troubles. In contrast, players and boards in England and Australia have been openly supportive of those who need breaks, even multiple breaks or permanent ones. In both countries, cricketers have reached out through the respective players' associations, which represent the welfare of past and current cricketers, and which have created enabling systems, such as anonymous helplines. In India, the players' association is exclusively for retired cricketers who have played a minimum of one international match or ten men's first-class matches or five women's first-class matches. And even then the association is too limited in its power for real help. It certainly didn't feature in the account of Praveen Kumar, who came close to shooting himself in 2019 as the silence of retirement closed in on him.

"I told myself, 'Kya hai yeh sab? Bas khatam karte hain,'" [What's all this? Let me just end it] Kumar told the Indian Express. He only stopped himself when his eyes fell upon a picture of his children, and was soon in therapy. The Express story tells of Kumar's agony after being dropped from the Indian team and missing out on the IPL - a life cooped up in his room, watching his own highlights reel.


A tendency to downplay and dismiss the prevalence of mental illness in India has been a byproduct of the media feeding frenzy in the wake of the suicide of the actor Sushant Singh Rajput Indranil Mukherjee / © AFP/Getty Images

It's not unheard of for former players to crave the highs of their fleeting time at the top. The dynamics of trying to become a top athlete involve such an obsessive relationship with the sport in the formative years that your identity is tied to it. With the advent of social media and multi-crore IPL contracts for teenagers, the risks are even higher, fears Parikh.

"If I was working with a young sportsperson who is suddenly doing well, I would put all my might into grounding this person into focusing on performance, shutting the noise of friends, shutting the noise of adulation, virtually not looking at your bank balance, and focusing on the next ball," he said. "If I'm not able to succeed in doing that, your failure rate would be higher. Look at those people who've had a great IPL, and who did not follow it up.

"Imagine a scenario where you know that endorsements will make a difference, where you know that social-media followership and your individual identity will also make a difference. How do you ensure that this component of your life is like an occupational need but not the core? You may get endorsements today, and one bad season and they're all done with."

There is work in progress on this front at the National Cricket Academy, where Rahul Dravid and his team have tried to roll out mental-health seminars for even those young players who aren't contracted or part of NCA camps, alongside those who represent India in age-group and developmental cricket.

Between that and Kohli's call for more openness, there is a start.

But for now, as the world's richest board ignores even the simplest of requests - a psychologist for its women's team, which has played two World Cup finals in three years - the creation of a comprehensive support system seems a distant dream.

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To lead Britain through a crisis, you have to be able to see beyond it: Gordon Brown abandons Neoliberal Economics

When the economy collapsed in 2008, I had to think ahead. I fear too little thought has been given to our recovery after Coronavirus writes Gordon Brown

‘Our young people now face the worst labour market for 50 years.’ Photograph: Hollie Adams/Getty Images


Our country’s Covid-19 crisis, together with the economic crisis the pandemic brought with it, is not over. In fact, it is entering a dangerous new phase.

With the UK economy collapsing by 25% in March and April – a fall twice as bad as those in Europe and the US and now only halfway back to pre-crisis level – a recovery plan is needed: closer to France’s £90bn, Germany’s £115bn and the US’s £1tn is required, not the £30bn announced by the chancellor in July.

Millions of people – not 200,000 as now – must be tested every day if the mass return to the workplace is not to result in a second wave of the disease.

And, if the end of the furlough scheme on 31 October is not to bring the highest number of redundancies in living memory, new job-protection measures – based on the Office for Budget Responsibility’s assessment that unemployment could reach 3m – will have to be implemented in the next few days.

Already I see the Conservative economic doves of the spring reverting to type, emerging as the grasping fiscal hawks of autumn, unable to see that every economic orthodoxy has been turned on its head.

Having led the country through one big crisis after 2008 – I had to learn quickly, and learn from my own mistakes – I can feel some sympathy for Boris Johnson, even though mea culpa is the one Latin phrase that will never cross his lips. But I found back then that it was not enough just to do day-to-day crisis management, or even to be one step ahead of events; the real challenge is to anticipate the next problem but one.

More than that, to solve each problem I had to get to the root of it, often by overriding conventional thinking, and following that up with a relentless determination to mobilise all the weapons at one’s disposal. In 2008 the banks were running capitalism without capital, so we nationalised strategically important financial institutions.

Now, in 2020 and still in the absence of a vaccine or a cure, we should have been clear from the outset that regular mass testing was – and still is – the effective way to detect the spread of the disease and then to respond with prompt local public health interventions.

But I fear that those responsible – having misspent millions on contracts for serially ineffective initiatives – have given too little thought to what also matters in the days ahead: engineering the long-term recovery.

Investing now – to save good companies and prevent the destruction of capacity and the loss of key jobs and skills for good – means following Germany and France by maintaining furlough payments in key sectors, preferably with a wage subsidy for part-time work, and with the backstop offer of retraining during absence from the workplace.

And, where workers have to stay at home to avoid the spread of infections during the inevitable increase of pandemic-related local lockdowns, the support available to them has to feed their families, which today’s miserly £90 a week does not.

Our young people now face the worst labour market for 50 years – yet today’s youth employment programme will assist only 350,000, and only for six months, when there are 3.5 million under-25s who are not in full-time education. So to guarantee a job, training or education requires a far more rapid expansion of new apprenticeship, college and university places, along with the re-introduction of the more generous future jobs programme that we had in 2009.

Tory austerity was never a good idea and is now an admitted failure. But it is frankly an economic absurdity when government borrowing costs are so small – 10-year gilt yields are around one-20th of those of 2008 – and unmet needs so extensive.

Indeed inflation – once seen as the justification for austerity economics – is so low in the US today that the Federal Reserve has deemed that maximising employment will now be its main priority. Again, the UK is behind the curve. In 1998, serving as chancellor, I was responsible for the Bank of England Act, which required the Bank to pursue high levels of employment. Now I am the first to say that the Bank needs a more demanding constitution, one that imposes a dual mandate: to take unemployment as seriously as inflation. This should be matched by an operational target stating that interest rates will not rise or stimulus end until unemployment falls to pre-crisis levels.

The current crisis is of course global as much as it is domestic. From 2008 to 2010, I spent much of my time persuading my fellow leaders to act as one, and to agree a synchronised stimulus alongside aid for developing countries. But I am shocked that now – with the world’s economies simultaneously damaged by the pandemic and an economic shock far worse than back then – the world’s leaders have done so little work together in response.

In short, all countries should be agreeing to call time on 50 years of neoliberal economics. They should break not only with their exclusive focus on controlling inflation, but with the pursuit of deregulation, liberalisation and privatisation at the expense of fairness, employment and sustainability. That project, once called the Washington consensus, is out of favour even in Washington. A new paradigm would give priority to fair trade, not just free trade; better control of the management of destabilising capital flows to replace the current free-for-all; a competition regime that can robustly address monopolistic behaviour from rent-seeking digital platforms; an industrial policy that would include generous support for science and innovation – with all that wrapped in a commitment to action on climate change and action on unacceptable levels of inequality.

Could it happen here? I believe so. While the government may feel able to steamroller its policies through the House of Commons thanks to an 80-seat majority, our multinational and increasingly regionally diverse country can no longer be straitjacketed, as now, by a remote and failing centralised state.

In contrast to the tiny and fallible cabal in No 10, democracy is rising again elsewhere: no longer just MPs and local councillors, but directly elected metro mayors and elected decision-making bodies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. And, as with the outrage against the government’s breach of international law, a rebellion of the regions and nations could force the prime minister to listen.

A challenge no doubt, especially with this prime minister. But he is already worried about the fragility of his recently acquired strength in the north of England; and as a unionist, he knows he must also take heed of voices in Scotland and Wales, where his popularity is waning fast. Politically – and despite his formidable record in the genre – he knows he cannot afford a U-turn on the union.

A strong alliance encompassing trades unions and businesses too can thus not only press for a recovery plan but also revive the spirit of cooperation and unity across our country – and, through a newfound solidarity, give the British people what we need most: hope.

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Seeing Mussolini’s Italy in Modi’s India

There are uncanny parallels between the Italy of the 1920s and the India of the 2020s writes Ram Guha in Scroll India

 

I read a lot of biographies, these often set in other countries than my own. A book I have just finished is Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism, by the Canadian scholar, Fabio Fernando Rizi. It uses the life of a great philosopher to tell a larger story of the times he passed through.

Reading Rizi’s book, I found uncanny parallels between the Italy of the 1920s and the India of the 2020s. The myth of Benito Mussolini, like the myth of Narenda Modi, was crafted by writers and propagandists “eager to sing paeans to the genius of the Duce”. These propagandists had begun to call the leader of fascism “the providential man”, “the man of massive faith”, or simply, “the Man of Providence”. Thus was created “the myth of the Duce, the chief who is always right, the leader who dares where others vacillate”.

In December 1925, the Italian State passed a new law, which came down hard on the press and its freedoms. The consequences of this law were that “within a few months, the most important papers came under Fascist control, one by one. Some owners were compelled to sell under economic or political pressure. All the liberal editors had to resign and were replaced by more accommodating men.”

Professed reverence for the laws

In the same year, Benedetto Croce characterised the ideology of the ruling party and of Mussolini as a “bizarre mixture of appeals to authority and to demagoguery, of professed reverence for the laws and of violation of the laws, of ultra-modern concepts and of musty old trash, abhorrence of culture and sterile attempts at producing a new one…” In this regard, the Italian State of the 1920s bears a striking resemblance to Modi’s regime today which speaks respectfully of the Constitution while blatantly violating its spirit and essence, which appeals to ancient wisdom while displaying a contempt for modern science, which claims to exalt ancient culture while manifesting an utter philistinism in practice.

While most independent-minded Italian intellectuals were forced into exile, Benedetto Croce stayed on in his homeland, offering an intellectual and moral opposition to fascism. As his biographer puts it, “[w]hereas the regime employed the mass media and the education system to promote the cult of Mussolini and to inculcate submission to authority, demanding from the new generations, in mystical union with the Duce, without asking questions, ‘to believe, to obey, to fight’, Croce, instead, offered a set of liberal values, preached freedom, defended the dignity of man, as a free agent, and urged individual decision and personal responsibility.” 

Reading further into Rizi’s book, I found this passage: “By the end of 1926, liberal Italy had died. Mussolini had consolidated his power and created the legal instruments for the continuation of his dictatorship. Political parties had been outlawed, and freedom of the press destroyed. The opposition had been disarmed and Parliament reduced to impotence. By 1927 it had become almost impossible to undertake any political action; it was also dangerous to express critical opinions in personal letters or in public places. Civil employees could lose their jobs if they expressed views contrary to government policy.

“Besides a powerful and revitalized police division in the Ministry of the Interior, under the direct responsibility of the chief of police, a new and efficient secret police organization, ominously and mysteriously called OVRA, was created with the aim of repressing any sign of anti-fascism and controlling any expression of dissent. In a short while, it collected files on more than one hundred thousand people, including Fascist leaders, and built an impressive web of special agents, spies, and informers whose reach extended throughout the country and even abroad.”

As I was transcribing these words from Rizi’s book, news came in of the home ministry demanding, from the Finance Commission, a sum of Rs 50,000 crore to fund what it called “real-time surveillance” of citizens. This at a time when the states are being denied the money owed to them by the Centre; and while the home ministry has already dangerously abused its powers through the foisting of fake cases on independent thinkers, activists, and journalists.

And here is Rizi’s description of the Italian Parliament, c. 1929: “Parliament had become a rubber stamp of the government’s decisions. Speeches of the few remaining members of the opposition were ignored, or more often shouted down to jeers from the floor and from the public galleries.”
Patria and gloria

Fabio Fernando Rizi’s book focuses on one person in one country, and eschews comparative analysis. However, in passing, the author remarks that “Italian Fascism created an authoritarian regime, ever increasing its reach, but it did not have the time, perhaps did not even possess the strength, to build a totalitarian society.” This must be read as meaning only one thing; however awful Mussolini’s Italy was, it was not nearly as awful as Hitler’s Germany.

After reading Rizi’s intellectual biography of Benedetto Croce, I turned to David Gilmour’s magnificent book, The Pursuit of Italy, a wide-ranging and compellingly readable history of that country from the beginnings of time. Thirty of the four hundred pages of this book deal with Mussolini’s years in power. As with Rizi, much of what Gilmour said about Italy in the past chillingly resonated with what I am witnessing in my own country at present.

Consider thus these remarks: “In the 1930s the regime’s style became more ostentatious. There were more parades, more uniforms, more censorship, more hectoring, more speeches from the leader, more shouting, gesturing and grimacing from a balcony to vast crowds, which greeted Mussolini’s every reference to patria and gloria with chants of ‘Du-ce! Du-ce! Du-ce!’”.

Much the same could be said about Modi’s rule, especially after he won a second term in 2019, his every utterance greeted with “Mo-di! Mo-di! Mo-di!”.

Credit: Prakash SINGH / AFP

Why did the Italian demagogue enjoy such great popularity among the masses? Here is Gilmour’s answer: “Mussolini survived so long partly because he incarnated certain strands of italianata; he embodied the hopes, fears and generations that believed Italy had been cheated of its due, both by its liberal politicians and by its wartime allies, who had forced it to accept the ‘mutilated peace.’”

By the same token, Modi has successfully appealed to an alleged Golden Age in the distant past where Hindus were supreme in India and abroad, argued that Hindus had slipped from that pedestal owing to Muslim and British conquerors in the past, and pitted himself against conniving and corrupt Congress politicians who would drag Hindus and India down again.

Reading these books about Italy in the 1920s in the India of the 2020s, I was depressed by the many parallels; but also consoled by the few departures. Unlike Mussolini’s Italy, in Modi’s India, the Bharatiya Janata Party has had to contend with political opposition from other parties; admittedly an Opposition much attenuated at the Centre, but still fairly robust in half-a-dozen major states of the Union. The press has been tamed, but not entirely crushed. And while Mussolini’s Italy had only Benedetto Croce to call it to account, Modi’s India still has many writers and intellectuals speaking out courageously in defence of the founding principles of the Republic, and in all the languages of the Republic too.

In The Pursuit of Italy, after describing how Mussolini consolidated his rule, Gilmour remarks: “Fascism’s appeal was blunted, however, by its failure to provide prosperity. Italians might be deceived into thinking they were well governed but they could not be deceived into thinking they were well off.” Mussolini failed in providing jobs and prosperity; whereas Modi has, in fact, done far worse on the economic front, his ill-thought and quixotic policies annulling much of the progress that the Indian economy had made in the three decades since liberalisation.

Millions of young men today fanatically follow Narendra Modi. The fate that awaits them, and us, is anticipated in what Benedetto Croce said with regard to the millions of young men who fanatically followed Mussolini. After the Italian dictator had died and his regime had finally fallen, Croce wrote sadly of “the treasury of moral energies that the oppressive regime misguided, exploited and at the end had betrayed”.

Benito Mussolini and his fascists thought they would rule Italy forever. Narendra Modi and the BJP think likewise. These fantasies of eternal rule will not come to fruition; but so long as the present regime remains in power, it will continue to extract a horrendous cost – in economic, political, social, and moral terms. Italy took decades to recover from the ravages of Mussolini and his party; India may take even longer to recover from the ravages of Modi and his party.

Statistics, lies and the virus: Five lessons from a pandemic

In an age of disinformation, the value of rigorous data has never been more evident writes Tim Harford in The FT 

Will this year be 1954 all over again? Forgive me, I have become obsessed with 1954, not because it offers another example of a pandemic (that was 1957) or an economic disaster (there was a mild US downturn in 1953), but for more parochial reasons. 

Nineteen fifty-four saw the appearance of two contrasting visions for the world of statistics — visions that have shaped our politics, our media and our health. This year confronts us with a similar choice. 

The first of these visions was presented in How to Lie with Statistics, a book by a US journalist named Darrell Huff. Brisk, intelligent and witty, it is a little marvel of numerical communication. 

The book received rave reviews at the time, has been praised by many statisticians over the years and is said to be the best-selling work on the subject ever published. It is also an exercise in scorn: read it and you may be disinclined to believe a number-based claim ever again. 

There are good reasons for scepticism today. David Spiegelhalter, author of last year’s The Art of Statistics, laments some of the UK government’s coronavirus graphs and testing targets as “number theatre”, with “dreadful, awful” deployment of numbers as a political performance. 

“There is great damage done to the integrity and trustworthiness of statistics when they’re under the control of the spin doctors,” Spiegelhalter says. He is right. But we geeks must be careful — because the damage can come from our own side, too. 

For Huff and his followers, the reason to learn statistics is to catch the liars at their tricks. That sceptical mindset took Huff to a very unpleasant place, as we shall see. Once the cynicism sets in, it becomes hard to imagine that statistics could ever serve a useful purpose.  

But they can — and back in 1954, the alternative perspective was embodied in the publication of an academic paper by the British epidemiologists Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill. They marshalled some of the first compelling evidence that smoking cigarettes dramatically increases the risk of lung cancer. 

The data they assembled persuaded both men to quit smoking and helped save tens of millions of lives by prompting others to do likewise. This was no statistical trickery, but a contribution to public health that is almost impossible to exaggerate.  

You can appreciate, I hope, my obsession with these two contrasting accounts of statistics: one as a trick, one as a tool. Doll and Hill’s painstaking approach illuminates the world and saves lives into the bargain. 

Huff’s alternative seems clever but is the easy path: seductive, addictive and corrosive. Scepticism has its place, but easily curdles into cynicism and can be weaponized into something even more poisonous than that. 

The two worldviews soon began to collide. Huff’s How to Lie with Statistics seemed to be the perfect illustration of why ordinary, honest folk shouldn’t pay too much attention to the slippery experts and their dubious data. 

Such ideas were quickly picked up by the tobacco industry, with its darkly brilliant strategy of manufacturing doubt in the face of evidence such as that provided by Doll and Hill. 

As described in books such as Merchants of Doubt by Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes, this industry perfected the tactics of spreading uncertainty: calling for more research, emphasising doubt and the need to avoid drastic steps, highlighting disagreements between experts and funding alternative lines of inquiry. The same tactics, and sometimes even the same personnel, were later deployed to cast doubt on climate science. 

These tactics are powerful in part because they echo the ideals of science. It is a short step from the Royal Society’s motto, “nullius in verba” (take nobody’s word for it), to the corrosive nihilism of “nobody knows anything”.  

So will 2020 be another 1954? From the point of view of statistics, we seem to be standing at another fork in the road. The disinformation is still out there, as the public understanding of Covid-19 has been muddied by conspiracy theorists, trolls and government spin doctors.  

Yet the information is out there too. The value of gathering and rigorously analysing data has rarely been more evident. Faced with a complete mystery at the start of the year, statisticians, scientists and epidemiologists have been working miracles. I hope that we choose the right fork, because the pandemic has lessons to teach us about statistics — and vice versa — if we are willing to learn. 

The numbers matter 

“One lesson this pandemic has driven home to me is the unbelievable importance of the statistics,” says Spiegelhalter. Without statistical information, we haven’t a hope of grasping what it means to face a new, mysterious, invisible and rapidly spreading virus. 

Once upon a time, we would have held posies to our noses and prayed to be spared; now, while we hope for advances from medical science, we can also coolly evaluate the risks. 

Without good data, for example, we would have no idea that this infection is 10,000 times deadlier for a 90-year-old than it is for a nine-year-old — even though we are far more likely to read about the deaths of young people than the elderly, simply because those deaths are surprising. It takes a statistical perspective to make it clear who is at risk and who is not. 

Good statistics, too, can tell us about the prevalence of the virus — and identify hotspots for further activity. Huff may have viewed statistics as a vector for the dark arts of persuasion, but when it comes to understanding an epidemic, they are one of the few tools we possess. 

Don’t take the numbers for granted 

But while we can use statistics to calculate risks and highlight dangers, it is all too easy to fail to ask the question “Where do these numbers come from?” By that, I don’t mean the now-standard request to cite sources, I mean the deeper origin of the data. For all his faults, Huff did not fail to ask the question. 

 

He retells a cautionary tale that has become known as “Stamp’s Law” after the economist Josiah Stamp — warning that no matter how much a government may enjoy amassing statistics, “raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams”, it was all too easy to forget that the underlying numbers would always come from a local official, “who just puts down what he damn pleases”. 

The cynicism is palpable, but there is insight here too. Statistics are not simply downloaded from an internet database or pasted from a scientific report. Ultimately, they came from somewhere: somebody counted or measured something, ideally systematically and with care. These efforts at systematic counting and measurement require money and expertise — they are not to be taken for granted. 

In my new book, How to Make the World Add Up, I introduce the idea of “statistical bedrock” — data sources such as the census and the national income accounts that are the results of painstaking data collection and analysis, often by official statisticians who get little thanks for their pains and are all too frequently the target of threats, smears or persecution. 

 

In Argentina, for example, long-serving statistician Graciela Bevacqua was ordered to “round down” inflation figures, then demoted in 2007 for producing a number that was too high. She was later fined $250,000 for false advertising — her crime being to have helped produce an independent estimate of inflation. 

In 2011, Andreas Georgiou was brought in to head Greece’s statistical agency at a time when it was regarded as being about as trustworthy as the country’s giant wooden horses. When he started producing estimates of Greece’s deficit that international observers finally found credible, he was prosecuted for his “crimes” and threatened with life imprisonment. Honest statisticians are braver — and more invaluable — than we know.  

In the UK, we don’t habitually threaten our statisticians — but we do underrate them. “The Office for National Statistics is doing enormously valuable work that frankly nobody has ever taken notice of,” says Spiegelhalter, pointing to weekly death figures as an example. “Now we deeply appreciate it.”  

Quite so. This statistical bedrock is essential, and when it is missing, we find ourselves sinking into a quagmire of confusion. 

The foundations of our statistical understanding of the world are often gathered in response to a crisis. For example, nowadays we take it for granted that there is such a thing as an “unemployment rate”, but a hundred years ago nobody could have told you how many people were searching for work. Severe recessions made the question politically pertinent, so governments began to collect the data. 

More recently, the financial crisis hit. We discovered that our data about the banking system was patchy and slow, and regulators took steps to improve it. 

So it is with the Sars-Cov-2 virus. At first, we had little more than a few data points from Wuhan, showing an alarmingly high death rate of 15 per cent — six deaths in 41 cases. Quickly, epidemiologists started sorting through the data, trying to establish how exaggerated that case fatality rate was by the fact that the confirmed cases were mostly people in intensive care. Quirks of circumstance — such as the Diamond Princess cruise ship, in which almost everyone was tested — provided more insight. 

Johns Hopkins University in the US launched a dashboard of data resources, as did the Covid Tracking Project, an initiative from the Atlantic magazine. An elusive and mysterious threat became legible through the power of this data.  

That is not to say that all is well. Nature recently reported on “a coronavirus data crisis” in the US, in which “political meddling, disorganization and years of neglect of public-health data management mean the country is flying blind”.  

Nor is the US alone. Spain simply stopped reporting certain Covid deaths in early June, making its figures unusable. And while the UK now has an impressively large capacity for viral testing, it was fatally slow to accelerate this in the critical early weeks of the pandemic. 

Ministers repeatedly deceived the public about the number of tests being carried out by using misleading definitions of what was happening. For weeks during lockdown, the government was unable to say how many people were being tested each day. 

Huge improvements have been made since then. The UK’s Office for National Statistics has been impressively flexible during the crisis, for example in organising systematic weekly testing of a representative sample of the population. This allows us to estimate the true prevalence of the virus. Several countries, particularly in east Asia, provide accessible, usable data about recent infections to allow people to avoid hotspots. 

These things do not happen by accident: they require us to invest in the infrastructure to collect and analyse the data. On the evidence of this pandemic, such investment is overdue, in the US, the UK and many other places. 

Even the experts see what they expect to see 

Jonas Olofsson, a psychologist who studies our perceptions of smell, once told me of a classic experiment in the field. Researchers gave people a whiff of scent and asked them for their reactions to it. In some cases, the experimental subjects were told: “This is the aroma of a gourmet cheese.” Others were told: “This is the smell of armpits.” 

In truth, the scent was both: an aromatic molecule present both in runny cheese and in bodily crevices. But the reactions of delight or disgust were shaped dramatically by what people expected. 

Statistics should, one would hope, deliver a more objective view of the world than an ambiguous aroma. But while solid data offers us insights we cannot gain in any other way, the numbers never speak for themselves. They, too, are shaped by our emotions, our politics and, perhaps above all, our preconceptions. 

A striking example is the decision, on March 23 this year, to introduce a lockdown in the UK. In hindsight, that was too late. 

“Locking down a week earlier would have saved thousands of lives,” says Kit Yates, author of The Maths of Life and Death — a view now shared by influential epidemiologist Neil Ferguson and by David King, chair of the “Independent Sage” group of scientists. 

The logic is straightforward enough: at the time, cases were doubling every three to four days. If a lockdown had stopped that process in its tracks a week earlier, it would have prevented two doublings and saved three-quarters of the 65,000 people who died in the first wave of the epidemic, as measured by the excess death toll. 

That might be an overestimate of the effect, since people were already voluntarily pulling back from social interactions. Yet there is little doubt that if a lockdown was to happen at all, an earlier one would have been more effective. And, says Yates, since the infection rate took just days to double before lockdown but long weeks to halve once it started, “We would have got out of lockdown so much sooner . . . Every week before lockdown cost us five to eight weeks at the back end of the lockdown.” 

Why, then, was the lockdown so late? No doubt there were political dimensions to that decision, but senior scientific advisers to the government seemed to believe that the UK still had plenty of time. On March 12, prime minister Boris Johnson was flanked by Chris Whitty, the government’s chief medical adviser, and Patrick Vallance, chief scientific adviser, in the first big set-piece press conference. Italy had just suffered its 1,000th Covid death and Vallance noted that the UK was about four weeks behind Italy on the epidemic curve. 

With hindsight, this was wrong: now that late-registered deaths have been tallied, we know that the UK passed the same landmark on lockdown day, March 23, just 11 days later.  

It seems that in early March the government did not realise how little time it had. As late as March 16, Johnson declared that infections were doubling every five to six days. 

The trouble, says Yates, is that UK data on cases and deaths suggested that things were moving much faster than that, doubling every three or four days — a huge difference. What exactly went wrong is unclear — but my bet is that it was a cheese-or-armpit problem. 

Some influential epidemiologists had produced sophisticated models suggesting that a doubling time of five to six days seemed the best estimate, based on data from the early weeks of the epidemic in China. These models seemed persuasive to the government’s scientific advisers, says Yates: “If anything, they did too good a job.” 

Yates argues that the epidemiological models that influenced the government’s thinking about doubling times were sufficiently detailed and convincing that when the patchy, ambiguous, early UK data contradicted them, it was hard to readjust. We all see what we expect to see. 

The result, in this case, was a delay to lockdown: that led to a much longer lockdown, many thousands of preventable deaths and needless extra damage to people’s livelihoods. The data is invaluable but, unless we can overcome our own cognitive filters, the data is not enough. 

The best insights come from combining statistics with personal experience 

The expert who made the biggest impression on me during this crisis was not the one with the biggest name or the biggest ego. It was Nathalie MacDermott, an infectious-disease specialist at King’s College London, who in mid-February calmly debunked the more lurid public fears about how deadly the new coronavirus was. 

Then, with equal calm, she explained to me that the virus was very likely to become a pandemic, that barring extraordinary measures we could expect it to infect more than half the world’s population, and that the true fatality rate was uncertain but seemed to be something between 0.5 and 1 per cent. In hindsight, she was broadly right about everything that mattered. MacDermott’s educated guesses pierced through the fog of complex modelling and data-poor speculation. 

I was curious as to how she did it, so I asked her. “People who have spent a lot of their time really closely studying the data sometimes struggle to pull their head out and look at what’s happening around them,” she said. “I trust data as well, but sometimes when we don’t have the data, we need to look around and interpret what’s happening.” 

MacDermott worked in Liberia in 2014 on the front line of an Ebola outbreak that killed more than 11,000 people. At the time, international organisations were sanguine about the risks, while the local authorities were in crisis. When she arrived in Liberia, the treatment centres were overwhelmed, with patients lying on the floor, bleeding freely from multiple areas and dying by the hour. 

The horrendous experience has shaped her assessment of subsequent risks: on the one hand, Sars-Cov-2 is far less deadly than Ebola; on the other, she has seen the experts move too slowly while waiting for definitive proof of a risk. 

“From my background working with Ebola, I’d rather be overprepared than underprepared because I’m in a position of denial,” she said. 

There is a broader lesson here. We can try to understand the world through statistics, which at their best provide a broad and representative overview that encompasses far more than we could personally perceive. Or we can try to understand the world up close, through individual experience. Both perspectives have their advantages and disadvantages. 

Muhammad Yunus, a microfinance pioneer and Nobel laureate, has praised the “worm’s eye view” over the “bird’s eye view”, which is a clever sound bite. But birds see a lot too. Ideally, we want both the rich detail of personal experience and the broader, low-resolution view that comes from the spreadsheet. Insight comes when we can combine the two — which is what MacDermott did. 

Everything can be polarised 

Reporting on the numbers behind the Brexit referendum, the vote on Scottish independence, several general elections and the rise of Donald Trump, there was poison in the air: many claims were made in bad faith, indifferent to the truth or even embracing the most palpable lies in an effort to divert attention from the issues. Fact-checking in an environment where people didn’t care about the facts, only whether their side was winning, was a thankless experience. 

For a while, one of the consolations of doing data-driven journalism during the pandemic was that it felt blessedly free of such political tribalism. People were eager to hear the facts after all; the truth mattered; data and expertise were seen to be helpful. The virus, after all, could not be distracted by a lie on a bus.  

That did not last. America polarised quickly, with mask-wearing becoming a badge of political identity — and more generally the Democrats seeking to underline the threat posed by the virus, with Republicans following President Trump in dismissing it as overblown.  

The prominent infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci does not strike me as a partisan figure — but the US electorate thinks otherwise. He is trusted by 32 per cent of Republicans and 78 per cent of Democrats. 

The strangest illustration comes from the Twitter account of the Republican politician Herman Cain, which late in August tweeted: “It looks like the virus is not as deadly as the mainstream media first made it out to be.” Cain, sadly, died of Covid-19 in July — but it seems that political polarisation is a force stronger than death. 

Not every issue is politically polarised, but when something is dragged into the political arena, partisans often prioritise tribal belonging over considerations of truth. One can see this clearly, for example, in the way that highly educated Republicans and Democrats are further apart on the risks of climate change than less-educated Republicans and Democrats. 

Rather than bringing some kind of consensus, more years of education simply seem to provide people with the cognitive tools they require to reach the politically convenient conclusion. From climate change to gun control to certain vaccines, there are questions for which the answer is not a matter of evidence but a matter of group identity. 

In this context, the strategy that the tobacco industry pioneered in the 1950s is especially powerful. Emphasise uncertainty, expert disagreement and doubt and you will find a willing audience. If nobody really knows the truth, then people can believe whatever they want. 

All of which brings us back to Darrell Huff, statistical sceptic and author of How to Lie with Statistics. While his incisive criticism of statistical trickery has made him a hero to many of my fellow nerds, his career took a darker turn, with scepticism providing the mask for disinformation. 

Huff worked on a tobacco-funded sequel, How to Lie with Smoking Statistics, casting doubt on the scientific evidence that cigarettes were dangerous. (Mercifully, it was not published.)  

Huff also appeared in front of a US Senate committee that was pondering mandating health warnings on cigarette packaging. He explained to the lawmakers that there was a statistical correlation between babies and storks (which, it turns out, there is) even though the true origin of babies is rather different. The connection between smoking and cancer, he argued, was similarly tenuous.  

Huff’s statistical scepticism turned him into the ancestor of today’s contrarian trolls, spouting bullshit while claiming to be the straight-talking voice of common sense. It should be a warning to us all. There is a place in anyone’s cognitive toolkit for healthy scepticism, but that scepticism can all too easily turn into a refusal to look at any evidence at all.

This crisis has reminded us of the lure of partisanship, cynicism and manufactured doubt. But surely it has also demonstrated the power of honest statistics. Statisticians, epidemiologists and other scientists have been producing inspiring work in the footsteps of Doll and Hill. I suggest we set aside How to Lie with Statistics and pay attention. 

Carefully gathering the data we need, analysing it openly and truthfully, sharing knowledge and unlocking the puzzles that nature throws at us — this is the only chance we have to defeat the virus and, more broadly, an essential tool for understanding a complex and fascinating world.

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.