Objective: Loneliness is a key public health issue for which various interventions have been trialled. However, few directly target the core feature of loneliness-lack of belonging. This is the focus of GROUPS 4 HEALTH (G4H), a recently developed intervention that targets the development and maintenance of social group memberships to support health. Method:To investigate the efficacy of this intervention, a randomized controlled trial was conducted with participants (N=120) assigned to G4H or treatment-as-usual (TAU) by computer software. Assessment of primary (loneliness) and secondary (depression, social anxiety, general practitioner visits, multiple group membership) outcomes was conducted at baseline and 2-month follow-up using mixed-model repeated-measures analyses.Results: G4H produced a greater reduction in loneliness (d = -1.16) and social anxiety (d = -0.53) than TAU (ds =-0.36, 0.03, respectively). G4H was also associated with fewer general practitioner visits at follow-up (d = -0.21) and a stronger sense of belonging to multiple groups (d = 0.96) relative to TAU (d = 0.21, d = 0.42, respectively). Depression declined significantly in both G4H (d = -0.67) and TAU (d = -0.35), but follow-up analyses showed this was greater in G4H among those not receiving adjunct psychopharmacological treatment and whose symptoms were milder.Conclusions: Findings suggest that G4H can be a useful way to treat loneliness and highlight the importance of attending to group memberships when tackling this important social challenge.

We examined whether people who are prone to believe COVID‐19 conspiracy theories are characterised by an especially strong concern for others or an especially strong concern for the self, and whether these orientations are associated with willingness to take a COVID‐19 vaccine. We surveyed 4,245 participants from eight nations; three months later we re‐contacted 1,262 participants from three nations. Belief in COVID‐19 conspiracy theories was related to greater concerns about one’s own safety, and lower concerns about the safety of close others. Furthermore, conspiracist ideation at Wave 1 predicted reluctance to take a COVID‐19 vaccine at Wave 2, mediated through relative concern for self versus other. In sum, people who are high in conspiracy beliefs have relatively higher concern for the self relative to others, with troubling implications for public health.

The COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest global crisis of our lifetimes and leadership has been critical to societies' capacity to deal with it. Here effective leadership has brought people together, provided a clear perspective on what is happening and what response is needed, and mobilised the population to act in the most effective ways to bring the pandemic under control. Informed by a model of identity leadership (Haslam, Reicher & Platow, 2020), this review argues that leaders' ability to do these things is grounded in their ability to represent and advance the shared interests of group members and to create and embed a sense of shared social identity among them (a sense of "us-ness"). For leaders, then, this sense of us-ness is the key resource that they need to marshal in order to harness the support and energy of citizens. The review discusses examples of the successes and failures of different leaders during the pandemic and organises these around five policy priorities related to the 5Rs of identity leadership: Readying, Reflecting, Representing, Realising and Reinforcing. These priorities and associated lessons are relevant not only to the management of COVID-19 but to crisis management and leadership more generally.

Social identities play an important role in many aspects of life, not least in those pertaining to health and well-being. Decades of research shows that these relationships are driven by a range of social identity processes, including identification with groups, social support received from groups, and multiple group memberships. However, to date, researchers have not had access to methods that simultaneously capture these social identity processes. To fill this void, this paper introduces an online Social Identity Mapping (oSIM) tool designed to assess the multidimensional and connected nature of social identities. Four studies (total N = 721) featuring community, student, new parent, and retiree samples, test the reliability and validity of oSIM. Results indicate that the tool is easy to use, engaging, has good internal consistency as well as convergent and discriminant validity, and predicts relevant outcomes across a range of contexts. Furthermore, using meta-analytic findings, the tool is able to index a higher-order social identity construct, here introduced as a supergroup. This new concept provides holistic information about groups (reflecting an integrated index of several social identity processes) that are predictive of well-being outcomes, as well as outcomes related to successful adjustment to challenging life events. We discuss how the tool can be used to tackle key debates in the literature and contribute to theory by affording researchers the opportunity to capture the nuanced and contextual nature of social identity in action.

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