Do you ever wonder what the Behavioural Insight Team (aka, the Nudge Unit) are getting up to these days?
Gary Sidley took a deep dive into their website to find out.
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What Are The ‘Nudge Unit’ Doing These Days?
By Gary Sidley, as published by Health ethics Advocacy and Research Team (“HART”) on 1 June 2026
Since its advent in 2010, the Behavioural Insight Team (“BIT”) has acted as an ongoing source of expert advice to the government to help enhance the power and effectiveness of its communication campaigns. Utilising a range of behavioural science strategies (‘nudges’) – psychological methods of persuasion that often operate below people’s conscious awareness – these approaches strive to shape the behaviour of their target population. Throughout the covid event, the BIT (together with other prominent behavioural scientists such as Susan Michie, who now occupies a senior position at the World Health Organisation) operated as a source of such guidance to strengthen public health messaging to maximise people’s compliance with “pandemic” restrictions and the vaccine rollout.
Although initially a core component of government, BIT has evolved into a private company, reliant on contractual arrangements for its funding. During the covid era, the BIT was awarded two lucrative contracts with the UK administration: £4 million from the Cabinet Office to provide “frictionless access to behavioural insights to match central priorities” and £1 million from the Department of Health and Social Care for “various work for test, trace, contain and enable agenda.”
The Government’s use of behavioural science strategies on its own citizens has evoked significant ethical concerns, mainly deriving from their often covert-mode of operation and the fact that nudges typically rely on inflating emotional discomfort (inducing fear, shame and scapegoating) to change behaviour. Further criticism of the way that BIT operates relates to its uncritical promotion of technocratic goals, where the assumption is that the government of the day always knows what is best for us all, and that it is therefore legitimate for a “social purpose company” to manipulate people into complying with these decrees.
So, what is BIT focusing on in these post-covid years? My online searches of their current activity initially revealed the following work streams.
1. Promoting Covid Vaccine Uptake In Third-World Countries
Many will recall how BIT enthusiastically promoted vaccine uptake throughout the covid event, deploying a range of nudges (including ramping up fear and shame) to encourage people of all ages to accept the injection. Given the increasing recognition of the net harms of the covid “vaccines,” together with compelling historical evidence suggesting that the effectiveness of many common vaccines has been overstated, one might expect that BIT’s fervour for these concoctions will now have waned. Apparently not.
The first, most prominent, article on their website, titled ‘Vaccines in the age of engagement’, bemoans the recent significant drop in global vaccination rates, partly attributing the decline to “misinformation and hesitancy,” and recommends the deployment of a range of nudges to increase uptake in “resource-constrained settings.” This commentary is a follow-up to an earlier BIT blogpost, ‘Jabbing through indifference in the post-pandemic era’, focusing on declining covid immunisation rates in Indonesia. A central assumption running through both these articles is that any reticence to seek the injections can be overcome by either providing the “right information” or making it easier to access the vaccination hubs; the possibility that people are – appropriately – questioning the safety and effectiveness of these chemicals is never considered.
2. Exploring the Impact of Social Media on the Beliefs of Young People
Thesecond most prominent article on the BIT website investigates the political content that young people encounter online. Commissioned by the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, the behavioural scientists at BIT simulated the behaviour of 18 to 24-year-olds on TikTok, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter), and analysed the content of the political posts that the algorithms recommended to them. The researchers reported that the information being channelled towards young people favoured “right wing” opinions and decided that much of it was “sensationalist, polarising and often promoted extremist views.” This conclusion raises crucial questions about how subjective constructs – “right wing,” “polarising,” “extremist” – were defined and the degree to which the ideological viewpoints of the researchers have shaped the study’s methodology and findings.
A reading of the full report gives further credence to the suggestion of a political bias within the project. For a perspective to be tagged as “extremist,” all that was required was that the message “indicates support for views outside the political mainstream”; clearly, any criticism of the dominant covid or climate catastrophe narratives would find their way into this category. Similarly, the authors’ definition of a “conspiracy theory” – “a belief or explanation that attributes the cause of an event or situation to the secret and coordinated actions of powerful actors (such as governments, corporations or elites)” – ignores the fact that the strategic manoeuvres of influential non-elected bodies (the World Health Organisation, the World Economic Forum, international coalitions like the G7 and G20, the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) are often less than transparent. And that is before we consider the murky world of prominent “think tanks” – the Council on Foreign Relations, for example – whose profound influence on national governments over the last century has been well documented.
Unsurprisingly, one of BIT’s key recommendations was that European Union member states “consider raising and effectively enforcing minimum age limits for full-feature social media access,” an action that, if implemented, would require age verification and thereby take us ever closer to the globalists’ Holy Grail of a universal Digital ID system. These technocratic, one-world government aspirations chime with the objectives of the study’s financer, Sitra, who describe their mission to be, “Solving global challenges … and accelerating economic growth within the limits of nature’s carrying capacity’, and one of their primary goals to, ‘Bring climate emissions from our operative activities down to net zero by 2035.”
3. Overcoming Scepticism About Heat Pumps
As previously mentioned, a regular source of income for BIT derives from contractual arrangements with the UK Government. A quick Internet search for recent projects of this type revealed a £100,000 contract with the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero titled, ‘The impact of misinformation on heat pump demand’. The overarching aim of this piece of work is to combat “myths” about heat pumps and encourage their adoption, thereby enable the Government to meet its target of installing 600,000 per year by 2028 – as explicitly stated in the commissioning letter, to have a realistic hope of meeting this objective, “public awareness and acceptance of the technology needs to increase as consumer demand cannot be driven by installers and manufacturers alone.”
The behavioural scientists at BIT have, dutifully, accepted this challenge. Toby Park (Head of Climate, Energy, and Sustainability at BIT) described heat pumps as “a very efficient low-carbon system for keeping our homes warm,” and laments that “negative perceptions remain a barrier to their widespread adoption.” To remedy these assumed cognitive distortions of the general public, BIT’s strategy was to conduct a large-scale survey of public attitudes and a media analysis to identify the sources of “misinformation,” followed by a campaign to correct false beliefs. In addition, to make heat pumps more visible (a “normative pressure” nudge), BIT have developed a “heat-pump show-home” project.
Astonishingly, there is no consideration given to the possibility that people’s reluctance to replace their current, highly efficient, gas central-heating systems with heat pumps is a rational one. BIT appear blind to the facts that heat pumps use vast quantities of electricity and are costly to service; even green-energy fanatic, Dale Vince, is against them, believing that they won’t reduce energy bills, a view also shared by the BBC. Nor do BIT mention that heat pumps need replacing every 15-20 years, or that they are very noisy.
Conclusion
The most prominent take-home point from this quick dive into the recent activity of BIT is that they continue to uncritically facilitate the objectives of the global technocrats – as detailed in the United Nations’ document that lists their 17 “sustainable development” goals – despite escalating criticisms of many of the elements of this agenda. Thus, the BIT team apparently assume that the aims of the Big-Pharma-dominated pandemic industry are always altruistic and happily promote vaccines across the world, even the much-maligned mRNA variety. They willingly push climate catastrophism, seemingly failing to recognise the fundamental errors of this narrative and the flawed modelling that underpins it. And they appear happy to collaborate with unelected, we-know-what’s-best-for-you-all technocrats in their mission to shape our day-to-day behaviour via a digital prison. All-in-all, one can reasonably suggest that the BIT operates as a propaganda arm for top-down, authoritarian ideologies that are currently striving for us all to be injected, perpetually fearful and centrally controlled.
About the Author
Gary Sidley is a retired clinical psychologist with over 30 years’ experience working for the NHS. He is a member of Smile Free and the Health Advisory and Recovery Team (“HART”).
Featured image: Rachel Coyle MBE, BIT’s Chief Executive Officer (left). Dr. Helen Brown, Managing Director BIT UK (centre). Sasha Tregebov, Managing Director BIT Americas (right).
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