Risk factors for loneliness: A literature review.

Rationale: Increasingly, loneliness is being recognised as a serious problem with detrimental effects on health, as well as on social cohesion and community trust. To effectively tackle this complex issue, a clear understanding of the phenomenon and its main drivers is needed. Over years of scientific research on loneliness, many potential risk factors have emerged and been tested empirically.

Experimental pre-tests of public health communications on the COVID-19 vaccine: A null finding for medical endorsement, risk and altruism.

Objective: Vaccination campaigns against COVID-19 will only be successful if enough people want to take the vaccine. We tested a government communications intervention to encourage uptake.

Design: A pre-registered randomised controlled trial.

Is it riskier to meet 100 people outdoors or 14 people indoors? Comparing public and expert perceptions of COVID-19 risk.

People have limited capacity to process and integrate multiple sources of information, so how do they integrate multiple contextual risk factors for Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) infection? In June 2020, we elicited risk perceptions from a nationally representative sample of the public ( = 800) using three psychologically-distinct tasks. Responses were compared to a sample of medical experts who completed the same tasks. Relative to experts, the public perceived lower risk associated with environmental factors (such as whether a gathering takes place indoors or outdoors) and were less inclined to treat risk factors as multiplicative.

Using decision aids to support self-isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Objective: Self-isolation is a vital element of efforts to contain COVID-19. We set out to test whether decision aids can support self-isolation.

Design: We conducted a pre-registered online experiment with a nationally representative sample (n = 500).

Motivating social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic: An online experiment.

Rationale: Maintaining social distance during the COVID-19 pandemic can save lives. We therefore set out to test communication strategies to promote social distancing.

Objective: We aimed to test two novel public health messages against a control message.

It depends on how you ask: measuring bias in population surveys of compliance with COVID-19 public health guidance.

Objective: Accurate measurement of compliance with COVID-19 guidance is important for public health policy and communications. Responses to surveys, however, are susceptible to psychological biases, including framing effects and social desirability. Our aim was to measure the effects of these biases on estimates of compliance with public health guidance (eg, hand-washing, social distancing).