How Groups Affect Our Health and Well-Being: The Path from Theory to Policy

Considerable evidence now exists that people can draw on social groups in order to maintain and enhance health and well-being. We review this evidence and suggest that social identity theorizing, and its development in the social identity approach to health and well-being, can help us to understand the way that groups, and the identities that underpin them, can promote a social cure. Specifically, we propose that social groups are important psychological resources that have the capacity to protect health and well-being, but that they are only utilized effectively when individuals perceive they share identity with another individual or group. However, as powerful as shared identities may be, their consequences for health are largely ignored in policy and practice. In this review, we offer a novel direction for policy, identifying ways in which building and consolidating group identification can help to capitalize effectively on the potential of group membership for health. Using this as a basis to increase awareness, we go further to offer practical interventions aimed at assessing identity resources as substantial and concrete assets, which can be cultivated and harnessed in order to realize their health-enhancing potential.