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The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a light on the complex relationship between science and policy. Policymakers have had to make decisions at speed in conditions of uncertainty, implementing policies that have had profound consequences for people's lives. Yet this process has sometimes been characterised by fragmentation, opacity and a disconnect between evidence and policy. In the United Kingdom, concerns about the secrecy that initially surrounded this process led to the creation of Independent SAGE, an unofficial group of scientists from different disciplines that came together to ask policy-relevant questions, review the evolving evidence, and make evidence-based recommendations. The group took a public health approach with a population perspective, worked in a holistic transdisciplinary way, and were committed to public engagement. In this paper, we review the lessons learned during its first year. These include the importance of learning from local expertise, the value of learning from other countries, the role of civil society as a critical friend to government, finding appropriate relationships between science and policy, and recognising the necessity of viewing issues through an equity lens.

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behaviour with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping. In each section, we note the nature and quality of prior research, including uncertainty and unsettled issues. We identify several insights for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic and highlight important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months.

We investigated the intensely positive emotional experiences arising from participation in a large-scale collective event. We predicted such experiences arise when those attending a collective event are (1) able to enact their valued collective identity and (2) experience close relations with other participants. In turn, we predicted both of these to be more likely when participants perceived crowd members to share a common collective identity. We investigated these predictions in a survey of pilgrims (N = 416) attending a month-long Hindu pilgrimage festival in north India. We found participants' perceptions of a shared identity amongst crowd members had an indirect effect on their positive experience at the event through (1) increasing participants' sense that they were able to enact their collective identity and (2) increasing the sense of intimacy with other crowd members. We discuss the implications of these data for how crowd emotion should be conceptualised., Funding Agency:Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) RES-062-23-1449 ES/G00711X/1

Funding Agency:Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) RES-062-23-1449 ES/G00711X/1

Identifying with a group can impact (positively) upon group members' health. This can be explained (in part) through the social relations that a shared identity allows. We investigated the relationship between a shared identity and health in a longitudinal study of a month-long pilgrimage in north India. Questionnaire data (N = 416) showed that self-reported health (measured before, during, and after the event) was better at the event than before, and although it reduced on returning home, it remained higher than before the event. This trajectory was predicted by data concerning pilgrims' perceptions of a shared identity with other pilgrims at the event. We also found evidence that a shared identity amongst pilgrims had an indirect effect on changes in self-assessed health via the belief one had closer relations with one's fellow pilgrims. We discuss the implications of these data for our understandings of the role of shared identity in social relations and health., Funding Agencies:Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) RES-062-23-1449 ES/G00711X/1

Identifying with a group can contribute to a sense of well-being. The mechanisms involved are diverse: social identification with a group can impact individuals' beliefs about issues such as their connections with others, the availability of social support, the meaningfulness of existence, and the continuity of their identity. Yet, there seems to be a common theme to these mechanisms: identification with a group encourages the belief that one can cope with the stressors one faces (which is associated with better well-being). Our research investigated the relationship between identification, beliefs about coping, and well-being in a survey (N=792) administered in rural North India. Using structural equation modelling, we found that social identification as a Hindu had positive and indirect associations with three measures of well-being through the belief that one can cope with everyday stressors. We also found residual associations between participants' social identification as a Hindu and two measures of well-being in which higher identification was associated with poorer well-being. We discuss these findings and their implication for understanding the relationship between social identification (especially with large-scale group memberships) and well-being. We also discuss the application of social psychological theory developed in the urban West to rural north India.

Funding Agency:Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) ES/G00711X/1

How does participation in a long-duration mass gathering (such as a pilgrimage event) impact well-being? There are good reasons to believe such collective events pose risks to health. There are risks associated with communicable diseases. Moreover, the physical conditions at such events (noise, crowding, harsh conditions) are often detrimental to well-being. Yet, at the same time, social psychological research suggests participation in group-related activities can impact well-being positively, and we therefore investigated if participating in a long-duration mass gathering can actually bring such benefits. In our research we studied one of the world's largest collective events - a demanding month-long Hindu religious festival in North India. Participants (comprising 416 pilgrims who attended the gathering for the whole month of its duration, and 127 controls who did not) completed measures of self-assessed well-being and symptoms of ill-health at two time points. The first was a month before the gathering commenced, the second was a month after it finished. We found that those participating in this collective event reported a longitudinal increase in well-being relative to those who did not participate. Our data therefore imply we should reconceptualise how mass gatherings impact individuals. Although such gatherings can entail significant health risks, the benefits for well-being also need recognition. Indeed, an exclusive focus on risk is misleading and limits our understanding of why such events may be so attractive. More importantly, as our research is longitudinal and includes a control group, our work adds robust evidence to the social psychological literature concerning the relationship between participation in social group activities and well-being., Funding Agency:Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) RES-062-23-1449 ES/G00711X/1

The authors draw upon the principles of the social identity tradition in order to elaborate a psychological model of mass communication. This centres on the way in which people construe their social identities and the meanings of events for these identities. They then go on to look at the ways in which these principles have been employed both to mobilize collective support for genocide and collective resistance to genocide. They conclude that it is critical to understand these principles and to apply them effectively in order to promote social harmony and the defence of vulnerable groups.

Two experiments exploring the effects of social category membership on real-life helping behavior are reported. In Study 1, intergroup rivalries between soccer fans are used to examine the role of identity in emergency helping. An injured stranger wearing an in-group team shirt is more likely to be helped than when wearing a rival team shirt or an unbranded sports shirt. In Study 2, a more inclusive social categorization is made salient for potential helpers. Helping is extended to those who were previously identified as out-group members but not to those who do not display signs of group membership. Taken together, the studies show the importance of both shared identity between bystander and victim and the inclusiveness of salient identity for increasing the likelihood of emergency intervention.

This paper outlines a new approach to the study of bystander intervention. Using insights derived from self-categorization theory (Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987), we explore the social category relations among those present in the context of physical violence. The paper describes two experiments that manipulate the social category relations between (a) bystander and fellow bystanders, and (b) bystander and victim. Analysis indicates that fellow bystanders are only influential when they are in-group rather than out-group members. Furthermore, bystanders are more likely to help victims who are described as in-group as opposed to out-group members. Overall, the findings suggest an important role for a self-categorization perspective in developing strategies to promote bystander intervention.

A central theme in both medical sociology and health psychology is how people make sense of their symptoms. Both literatures, despite their stress on different aspects of the health evaluation process, see illness in terms of matching present symptoms to an underlying understanding of illness. In this paper we argue that such accounts have difficulty in explaining the impact of contextual factors on how symptoms are evaluated. We therefore propose a model based on self-categorization theory (Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher & Wetherell, 1987). It is proposed that symptoms are evaluated, not against pre-existing illness representations, but by reference to their impact on situationally salient identities. In support of this an experiment is described which involves students who are training to be physical education (PE) teachers. They are defined either in terms of a 'PE student' identity or in terms of a 'gender' identity and asked to evaluate a number of scenarios which describe different illnesses and injuries. Overall, the results provide clear evidence that the significance ascribed to scenarios depends on which identity is salient and hence indicate the viability of a self-categorization theory approach to symptom evaluation.

According to traditional models of deindividuation, lowered personal identifiability leads to a loss of identity and a loss of internalized control over behaviour This account has been challenged by arguing that manipulations of identifiability affect the relative salience of personal or social identity and hence the choice of standards to control behaviour The present study contributes to an extension of this argument according to which identifiability manipulations do not only affect the salience of social identity but also the strategic communication of social identity. Reicher and Lvine (1993) have shown that subjects who are more identifiable to a powerful outgroup will moderate the expression of those aspects of ingroup identity which differ from the outgroup position and which would be punished by the outgroup. Here we seek to show that in addition, subjects who are more identifiable to a powerful outgroup will accentuate the expression of those aspects of ingroup identity which differ from the outgroup position but which would not be punished by the outgroup. This is because, when identifiable, subjects may use such responses as a means of publicly presenting their adherence to group norms and hence as a means of establishing their right to group membership. A study is reported in which 102 physical education students are either identifiable (I) or not identifiable (NI) to their academic tutors. They are asked to respond on a number of dimensions where pilot interviews show the ingroup stereotype to differ from outgroup norms. Expressions of difference from the outgroup position would lead to punishment on some of these dimensions (P items) but would not lead to punishment for others (NP items) The predicted interaction between identifiability and item type is highly significant. As expected, for NP items identifiability accentuates responses which differentiate the ingroup stereotype from outgroup norms. All these results occur independently of shifts in th