Podcast- The Psychology of Brexit

The audio for this podcast can be found here.

Hello and welcome to the first episode of Discussions in Tunbridge wells, the new podcast produced by the Salomons Centre for Applied Psychology in Kent. My name is John McGowan and I’m a clinical Psychologist, I’m joined by two colleagues both also clinical psychologists Angela Gilchrist and Rachel Terry.

Now some of you may know us from our blog ‘Discursive of Tunbridge wells’ where we and guest bloggers write about a range of subjects related mainly to mental health and the NHS. For those of you who don’t know us, we are a postgraduate centre in Canterbury Christ Church University, in Kent, UK, primarily specialising in training clinical psychologists and psychological therapists. We also conduct a range of research looking at different aspects of health, wellbeing and disability.

In this podcast series we are going to be discussing many issues that we cover in our blog: mental health in the NHS, issues like that. Our aim though is to access a wider range of contributions and provide some interesting debates around some of this stuff.

We are starting today with a very topical issue. We do sometimes try and offer a psychological take on what’s going on in politics and at the time of recording in the UK at least there is one issue that is eclipsing all others: the EU referendum. Do we stay in or do we leave?

The polls at the moment in the UK are quite balanced but no one really knows how it’s going to go. What’s a lot clearer though is that the UK public feel very under informed about the issues even after months of campaigning. So it seems to me at this point that in this and a bunch of other areas we’ve had some quite interesting shifts in the way we think about politics in the last 2 or 3 years in Britain and America. It makes me wonder what’s going on here. Angela you’ve been involved in politics, you’ve been involved in Psychology for a number of years, sort us out!

Angela

I do think there is something quite extraordinary going on, it seems to me that the world has always been in a tumultuous place, but it’s in a highly precipitous place at the moment I would say. Things are becoming increasingly polarised in the western democracy. There’s a shift away from the centre to the extremes. If you think of somebody like Donald Trump who has the possibility of becoming president of the world’s most powerful country. That is a really scary proposition for me…

John

Terrifying! Not just for you.

Angela

One wonders how that has happened. How has such an extreme figure been able to get to that point? I think it’s something about people feeling very very threatened in times of economic difficulty.

John

It does seem clear that a number of things have changed and there does seem to be a loss of trust in traditional structures. Perhaps not for everybody but for some people, and in economic tough times. There’s a lot of inequality. I recently heard a speaker talking about the EU referendum, felt that resentment towards structures was perhaps driven by, increasing inequality which is something that both Britain an America really have. Though of course we see these kind of insurgences across the whole of Europe. What do you think about that Rachel?

Rachel

Well it’s making me think we should remain in Europe, and one the reasons for that is that it is a bit of a buffer for the potential for us having more extreme governments, it’s either extreme left wing or right wing. If we’re bound by certain European rules, for example employment law, human rights. I feel it’s very important that we remain in Europe for that reason

John

Yes and I suppose our group here would probably qualify as being pretty heavily ‘Remain’ group. We work in university by definition people who are high educational level, or fairly high educational, working in the university its fairly highly educated high school group. All the evidence seems to suggest that those people are considerably more likely to want to stay in and also far more relaxed about the ‘Leave’ campaign’s big issue which has been immigration. If you’re highly educated immigration is a good thing. It’s people who come to work in your department or work in your company. We get trainees here from all across Europe and that’s marvellous for us. Listen, if your educational level is lower and you live out in somewhere like east Kent which is within our patch, we serve the NHS in east Kent, those things may feel like a lot more of a threat. There may be a reality to that threat both from other parts of Europe and indeed form other parts of the UK really.

Rachel

I wouldn’t want to minimise the reality of that but I think that the Brexit campaign and previous government campaigns in the UK have been quite successful at perhaps putting problems onto migrants and immigration rather than elsewhere. Perhaps government policy in terms of problems we’re having, financial problems and so on I think it’s easy to externalise those problems and blame immigration when there might be more closer to home issues that might be relevant.

Angela

I think that’s true and I think for me who’s come from a different country, in fact came here in 2002 to work on the NHS. I responded to an advertisement overseas which suggested that clinical psychology was a national shortage occupation and the NHS at the time was desperate to get psychologists from overseas into service. I suppose what’s interesting for me as well as highly offensive is the realisation that probably 50% of the population here doesn’t like the idea of immigrants and sees those of us who’ve come from overseas as takers who are here to sponge from the system and that’s really hurtful when you’ve come here to bring skills and are in a highly skilled occupation that bears a lot of responsibility. We are contributing to the arena in that way. I think what’s characteristic of this particular campaign is that the facts have not meant a lot to the public even though the public keep calling for the facts and saying to the politicians, we don’t know what to believe, we don’t know what to go on. When they are presented with facts they ignore them. This isn’t peculiar to this particular political campaign; it’s something that humans do. We are not rational beings; we are far more driven by our emotions than we are by the facts so it’s much easier in a time of difficulty to suggest that our difficulties are created by foreigners and to make people very ‘other’, rather than to own up to the fact that a lot of these difficulties are home grown.

John

Well, I mean the issue of the NHS being able to survive without people coming into the country, I read a very interesting piece on The Conversation blog about this the other day, and it’s kind of laughable really that the NHS could really function without really large amounts of people with all sorts of different skill sets coming in from abroad. I suppose the out campaigns are talking about point systems and things like that. Those are all quite political arguments you were moving onto something that seems to me to be a lot more psychological which is…  I wrote an article about the Scottish referendum a couple of years ago and in that I said it’s not necessarily a huge surprise that politicians invite us in to a very simplistic place, especially when we’re faced with a binary choice like this, you know one thing is bad and one thing is good. You know there’s an over statement of the badness of the other side. I think what is psychologically interesting at this point is why seem a bit more in a position to respond to it. I gather Donald Trump’s favourability numbers have gone down somewhat, something of a relief to me, since the Orlando shooting. But none the less they are an alarming large number of people who are ready to vote for something that almost seems like a parody of the simplistic campaign.

Angela

It’s a parody of what a western democracy is really supposed to be about.

 

John

It’s almost like a you couldn’t make this kind of stuff up really. The question is, you were talking about a collapse of confidence and a need for scapegoating and I think that’s where it’s worth thinking about what’s going on, at least some people, they may be perfectly reasonable arguments for Brexit, I wouldn’t want to lump everyone in. In fact I don’t particularly go for those arguments but there’s something about scapegoating, you know, a psychological process of maybe perhaps being able to see, wanting to see things, some of us anyway, as a lot more polarised and a lot more black and white and being perhaps finding candidates that are offering these broad and simplistic solutions a lot more appealing.

Angela

Well I think the more threatened people feel, the more extreme things are likely to become.

Rachel

Or the more dissatisfied people become.

Angela

Or the more dissatisfied and you know it’s also ben interesting in the last couple of days to see how the present government has responded to that, because clearly the present government has started to feel very threatened by the possibility of a Brexit. Yesterday we had Osbourne’s highly, highly punitive suggestion of an emergency budget and so on…..

Rachel

There’s a worry with David Cameron’s spearheading  the remain campaign that people may identify dissatisfaction with the current government and therefore be anti-remain because that’s the way of expressing their dissatisfaction I think. I agree with you that at the moment the government are kind of resorting to coercion tactics to try and get people to vote for remain, which is threatening there will be tax increases, if we vote to leave. There is a sense of desperation now isn’t there?

Angela

Absolutely, it’s clear that the prime minister called the referendum because he was confident that he could win it hand down, he’s clearly not so confident today. So we are seeing some fairly desperate tactics I think in the last week to try and keep more people in the  remain camp.

John

There’s a lot of overstatement I think in these things. The interesting thing is why we are more convinced by it. So clearly we associate it with both campaigns. There was quote I read recently by Matthew d’Ancona in the Guardian he’s quite a right wing journalist but I think he is very well worth paying attention to. This is the quote ‘We have not sunk to the level of Donald Trump’s promise to build a wall, but what the leave campaign promises to share with those proposed Republican Presidential nominee is a bogus simplicity. The most famous wall of the 20^th Century symbolised the division of the western world into democracy and totalitarian regimes. The most famous wall of the 21^st century so far is Trump’s Mexican wall has yet to be built but already symbolises a more subtle but equally important division in modern politics between those who are willing to confront and can see the nuance of problems of government and those who think or say they think but such intricacies are excuses and pretext for delay’  That seems to me to be almost the very definition of a very simplistic Populism. Airy,  broad solutions, you know, Scottish nationalism etc, I wouldn’t want to necessarily lump them fully in with Donald Trump, though,  I don’t agree with Donald Trump’s ‘We’ll sort it by sorting it’. But we seem to be finding it more appealing in a circumstance where certain measure of confidence has collapsed.

Angela

Absolutely, what’s interesting for me is I grew up in South Africa during the apartheid years; I was a witness to all of those events. It’s very interesting to me that some of the things we’re hearing now are very similar to things I heard during that era in SA. The presence of the bogie man, making the immigrant very ‘other’. In SA of course the black man was the immigrant even though obviously black people were indigenous to SA, but they were almost regarded as foreigners. The government at the time wished to banish them all to so called ‘Homeland’ and so on. There were very similar patterns in people’s thoughts and conversations, they’re very different, they’re not the same as us, they don’t have the same cultures, the same standards, we’ll be swamped, we won’t be able to get health care, we won’t be able to stop the numbers increasing. People are very reluctant to look at the reality of the facts, and very reluctant to ask themselves ‘Is this logically true?’ Isn’t there a way of us all living together and sharing and caring for one another?

Rachel

For me the bit about identity as well, I think the Brexit campaign has been more successful at tapping into this issue of British identity and if we exit we’ll be maintaining our British-ness and we’ll have much more control. Whereas if we stay in Europe we’ll be subject to their laws, we will lose our British-ness which they play on as being so great and being weakened by being in Europe. So I think identity is a key component to this debate. The stay campaign needs to do more to highlight the role of European identity and UK being part of Europe not just separate.

John

I went to a talk recently by someone from the LSE, a public information talk and he was making a point that the Brits have always been rather reluctant EU members. And I think there is something in that. I suppose that I think the real fascinating bit is that social psychology would suggest to us, and I wouldn’t lump everyone in the Brexit campaign in this, the  notion of simplistic scapegoats  and particularly strong feelings around immigration do tend to intensify at periods of economic recession. It’s well worth thinking about why that should be and certainly we’re all clinical psychologists here a lot of the clinical ways that we understand people would suggest that when emotion is intensified people tend to go into more black and white ways of thinking. Cognitive behaviour therapy, black and white thinking it’s hard to hold the fact that actually the effect of immigration are quite complicated, they fall differentially on different people, but it’s not like there’s a fixed pool of jobs. People who come to our country create more demand for our services; economically contribute in all sorts of ways and the overwhelming evidence  suggests that people coming from the EU are actually not hanging around on benefits but contributing hugely to the economy. But it’s hard to keep that nuance, certainly in the Scottish referendum, where the things I was thinking about were psychoanalytic theories and the notions of Melanie Klein. I’m a psychoanalytic kind of guy and the notion of  Melanie Klein was the paranoid schizoid position. For want of a better way of describing it is really not being able to hold this complexity in good and bad within a single person.  So you get, Bernie Sanders supporters who are demonising Hillary Clinton as the worst thing ever. I hope some of them are going to vote for her, God I really hope so. Occasionally you read about the more extreme things about the European Union, it’s totalitarian, it’s dominant, we want to get our country back, like our country is lost. It’s a huge overstatement, it being too much to hold the middle position and I’m saying that the politicians, to an extent, invite us into that. Some are more prepared to do that in an ugly way than others. Donald Trump is prepared to do it in an incredibly ugly and utterly straightforward and transparent way.

Angela

It’s one way of looking at it but there are also evolutionary ways of looking at it. We could suggest that we are very threat sensitive as a species. We are designed to respond quickly to threat and that is so as to keep us alive as a species so that we keep propagating on the planet, so in a sense we are responding to a very ancient reptilian brain which kind of tells us if there’s danger do something about it, move out the way, take action, whatever. That’s almost contrary to thinking.

John

I guess you’re saying, one of the very few things that I’ve read about the psychological take on the EU referendum was that little piece about Daniel Kahneman the philosopher/ psychologist in the Telegraph where obviously quite a lot of people are in quite an angry place  but he was pointing out something broader about the biases that we bring to the table. We’re not rational beings; we jump without having all the information in all sorts of ways really.

Rachel

Which is one of the worries for me about the relatively right wing potentially media in this country and  I think when people are unclear they look to what others are doing and thinking and when you’ve got in media, the from page of the Sun which is very very pro Brexit, that is a worry for me, for those that  are unsure of which way to go, they will look to what other people are doing or they’ll look to others for advice and they maybe therefore influenced by The Sun or what their friends and family are voting and that’s a bit of a worry for me I think.

Angela

That kind of makes me think as well of something like social identity theory and Tajfel. And how we tend to remain in our own group, and we are unlikely to join another group very easily unless there’s some kind of common ground that can easily be identified. Actually we don’t very easily find common ground with other groups and that’s why is so easy to other different groups and regard them as inferior.

John

I’m very aware of, well hopefully not seeing other groups as inferior, but of some of those processes in myself. I’m aware that I’m basically probably well disposed towards the whole notion of the EU that I can see that is has problems but I’m also aware that the out campaign would probably have to go for a higher bar with me than the in campaign so I’m not approaching it in a reasonable way. I think Rachel, also what you’re saying is the difficulty of democracy really isn’t it? I think people might vote for the things that we don’t want them to vote for and they also say things that we don’t want them to say, though I think, and I’ve been quite influenced by you in this regard Angela, we both I think grew up in systems that were are quite closed in terms of information. You grew up in South Africa and I grew up in a very conservative and strictly religious family where there was a great deal of mistrust of things outside of that system and information is battened out, but your strong principle has been that we may not always like free information out there but in the long run it’s the best thing.

Angela

Absolutely. If you look at what’s happening in this campaign, in its early stages there was a complete paucity of real information, I think in this latter stage is the information is there and has become available because I think journalist have done quite a good job nailing politicians down and saying ‘What do you mean by that?’. ‘What will happen if we Brexit’, etc etc. but as I said earthlier, the public is reluctant to respond to the facts, they’re far more likely to respond to their emotions, even when the information becomes available.

Rachel

Even when the information is available both sides can present the same information in very different ways and it is quite difficult therefore of sort of make sense of and interpret it even when the information is available.

Angela

Absolutely, because some of it seems to be highly conflicting doesn’t it, you know the remainers will say that we are better off in than out, and outers will say that we’re better off out and both sides have managed to come up with things that back their particular stance but there’s also a hell of a lot of spin going on and outright lies.

John

…on both sides!

Angela

Both sides, both sides have behaved very badly I think.

John

I think on that note we’d better wine it down but I will say a couple of things. We’ll put some thinks on our show page to The UK  in a Changing Europe Foundation, who are a network of social scientists who are trying to provide clear and unbiased information from the public and also to one of the fact checking websites, a very good one called Full fact who have been calling out some of the exaggerated claims on both sides of the argument and I do think those are well worth looking at. But before we wind up just putting aside your own feelings about how you want it to go, I just want to ask you how do you think it will go? Are we going to stay or are we going to go Angela?

Angela

I think we will remain but by a whisker.

Rachel

And that’s shifted hasn’t it Angela? I remember us having a discussion early on when you were much more confident.

Angela

I was very confident that it would be 60 in and 40 out, but I’m more likely to think it’ll be something like 51 in now and 49 out.

Rachel

I think that it may be a Brexit actually, which I’m quite anxious about.

John

Yes, and I agree with you, it seems to be that the poles have begun to point more solidly for leave now and I do you think we will leave. Whatever leaving actually means because that’s of course the other big thing we don’t know what leaving is actually going to mean and quite how involved we will get with the EU in a different way. For me it’s relatively gloomy but realist note to end on.

All that really remains for me to say is that the best way to follow the podcast is to subscribe. You’ll find instructions about how to do that as well as links to what we have talked about on the show page and our blog. That’s blogs.canterbury.ac.uk/discursive

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