Why the disarray in the Brexit negotiations has a lot to do with cognitive and behavioural psychology

With less than two weeks before the UK is supposed to agree terms of the EU withdrawal agreement with the European Union, the news headlines at home focus on playing politics with the Brexiteers by promising to spend billions on the NHS.

You could be forgiven for thinking we are living in Alice in Wonderland. Except it’s not a fairy tale, although promises of vast sums of money for the NHS sometime in the future when those making those promises will be long gone does have a whiff of fantasy about it.

As the heavy-weight Sky News political commentator Adam Boulton ruefully observes in today’s Sunday Times (17 June 2018), MPs at Westminster have lost interest in the final consistency of Brexit. Instead, both sides in this game of Parliamentary ping-pong see the chance for ‘winner takes all’.

The fight over a “meaningful vote” about what to do at the end of this game of ping-pong matters only in the event of two woeful outcomes for British PM Theresa May who’s clinging onto power by her fingertips.

Either the “deal” struck with Brussels will be so poor that it’s rejected by MPs at Westminster in a final vote or a “no deal” stalemate is reached with Brussels.

British politicians on all sides clearly find it much easier to argue about these dreams or nightmares than to get down to serious business of hammering out the practical details of withdrawal, such as the customs arrangements with the EU with consequences for all businesses that rely on exports into the world’s biggest digital single market of 500m consumers.

And MPs have also put off trying to find a workable solution to the hard border question hanging over the fate of Northern Ireland and its relationship with the rest of the UK and the European Union.

Typically, during last week’s debate on the Withdrawal Bill, MPs airily agreed to postpone serious discussion on such matters, even though there are few precious months left in which to agree what the heck we are going to do about these and other issues before the UK heads for the exit door on 29 March 2019.

But this ‘winner takes all’ attitude is deeply flawed. And the reason for this is starkly obvious.

To successfully negotiate an outcome in the best interests of the UK, you need to be prepared to arrive at a compromise with Michel Barnier, the chief negotiator for the European Union. If you aren’t prepared to do that, then you’re wasting your and their time negotiating in the first place.

Watching the in-fighting of the British Cabinet and the absence of a coherent strategy or vision for the future of the UK outside of the EU is deeply depressing. This is having a poor impact for everyone in the UK who depends on its elected representatives to make a better job of the situation than they’re doing at present.

Most Brexiteers don’t want a “no deal” Brexit. Some intellectuals, such as Daniel Hannan and Dominic Cummings, the mastermind of the official Vote Leave campaign, are brave enough to admit that things are going wrong.

But another faction in the Tory Party, including Peter Bone and Iain Duncan Smith assert that “no deal” would be no problem. Many on the winning side of the Referendum fear their prize of leaving the EU is being wrenched from them as Parliament procrastinates.

These polar opposite attitudes from those in power are dependent on how the mind processes information and leads to internal responses. This is manifested in perceptions, attention span, language, memory and thinking of those charged with negotiating on our behalf.

In the situation where we believe we’re being unfairly treated in these Brexit negotiations, cognitive psychologists might attribute our resulting attitude such as our sense of foreboding and injustice at the European Commission to the way we habitually process information about situations such as this.

That way of processing such information may be enough to establish a pattern of thinking that’s repeated when the same situation presents itself, regardless of whether our attitudes, perceptions or beliefs are, in fact, well-founded.

More worryingly, cognitive psychologists believe that people often experience thoughts or feelings that reinforce faulty beliefs and which result in damaging behaviour. So cognitive behaviourists focus on both the thinking and the activity that results from such thinking. And such beliefs can result in problematic behaviours.

Take a workplace situation, for example, where someone who lacks self-confidence will avoid attending the office Christmas party because they feel awkward in such social situations and don’t know how to deal the boss on a one-to-one social setting.

What’s happening here is that the individual avoids such situations for fear of triggering negative patterns of thinking.

This cognitive behaviour isn’t just common among Brexiteers. There are equivalent disagreements on the pro-EU side too.

The Remainers, like the vast majority of Brexiteers, agree that next March is the point of no return if the UK formally leaves the EU on schedule with or without a 2-year transition period to soften the blow. Once on the outside, the UK will lose the right to participate in making rules and policy and will be a ‘rule-taker’.

To avoid what they see as this irreparable damage to UK’s interests, the pro-Europeans’ options are to try and stop Brexit, have a greater degree of Parliamentary scrutiny over any proposed deal with Brussels or push back the date of departure to some point in the future.

Speaking on BBC One’s Andrew Marr Show earlier today (Sunday 17 June 2018), May insisted she’d listened to Tory rebels' concerns after they rejected her bid to find a compromise over the EU Withdrawal Bill.

Claiming she recognised the concerns of Tories who want MPs to have more of a say if no Brexit deal is reached, she added she had to balance that with ensuring we don't overturn the decision of the British people and that was to leave the EU.

As a result, she said: “Parliament cannot tie the hands of government in negotiations. As we are sitting there negotiating on the details of our future relationship or our withdrawal agreement, we can't have a situation where every time we have to take a decision we have to go back and have a lengthy debate."

What we can all agree on, irrespective of which side of the negotiating table we sit, is that we code our life experiences to frame our attitudes, values, perceptions, beliefs and behaviours.

If we always have the attitude that negotiations for Brexit will go wrong, we’ll always be on the look out for experiences or stimuli that corroborate that pattern and we’ll respond accordingly, so that when negotiating with the Michel Barnier, for example, we’ll always expect the worst.

The door will always be left open on whether this attitude, or indeed the attitude of the Brexiteers or Remainers could be, in objective terms, mistaken, so that the resultant behaviour may not always be that helpful. And there’s always a possibility that all sides have exaggerated how badly the last round of negotiations actually went.

What’s clear is that a negative attitude fuels a negative outcome. And by the look of things, there’s a danger that the British Government are well on their way to making their anxieties self-fulfilling.