After podcaster Joe Rogan's wildly popular interview with Dr. Robert Malone aired on "The Joe Rogan Experience," fact checkers jumped into the fray to try to disprove assertions made by Malone.
One of those cited in the AP "fact check" tweeted in favor of cajoling the public into following COVID-19 restrictions, and now claims that the collective group think around COVID-19, termed by Malone as "mass formation psychosis," isn't real.
New York University assistant professor of psychology and neural science Jay Van Bavel, who "co-authored a book on group identities," has made claims that the only way to fight COVID-19 is for everyone to change their behavior until such time as a vaccine came along. And how to get everyone to change? "We have to think through the lens of behavioral science," Van Bavel wrote. "What can we do to nudge and encourage and cajole and motivate people to do the right thing?"
In a Nature article in 2020, Van Bavel posited that "insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behaviour with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts." What is this if not an attempt to push people to do what they're told?
The article addresses using fear as a means to control people, in the right doses: "A meta-analysis found that targeting fears can be useful in some situations, but not others: appealing to fear leads people to change their behaviour if they feel capable of dealing with the threat, but leads to defensive reactions when they feel helpless to act. The results suggest that strong fear appeals produce the greatest behaviour change only when people feel a sense of efficacy, whereas strong fear appeals with low-efficacy messages produce the greatest levels of defensive responses."