Social information, personality, and social health

We have tools to vastly improve public health and wellbeing - but we often don't use them. In large, this appears to be because knowledge is not passed on, acted upon, or trusted. A field of work investigates how individuals assess and pass on information, while an allied field examines the impact of personality on behavioural change. The present proposal aims to encourage these fields to engage with public health informational challenges, and to encourage institutions to detail what research approaches would be most useful. We focus on COVID-19 and Lyme Disease as two very different phenomena that provide concrete examples of the challenges of transmitting useful information in response to a new threat. We request funding for planning activities including an online meeting involving researchers from a variety of fields, healthcare, business, and community bodies. We aim to encourage applied research on these questions, form a working group, and to produce focussed research proposals.