‘I Feel Healthier Here Than at Home’: General Health Behaviour at Religious Mass Gatherings

The Maha Kumbh 2025 in Prayagraj, attended by hundreds of millions of pilgrims over 45 days, represents an unprecedented setting for examining health behaviour in the context of mass-gathering medicine. While such gatherings present substantial public-health challenges related to infectious disease transmission, sanitation, crowd safety and healthcare delivery, emerging social–psychological research also suggests that collective participation may enhance perceived well-being and health-related experiences. This article synthesizes evidence from public health, mass-gathering medicine, social psychology and health communication to examine the factors shaping health behaviour at religious mass gatherings. The review highlights that collective identity can foster social support, a sense of belonging and positive health experiences while also leading to non-compliance with perceived health risks and inhibiting protective behaviours. This article, therefore, proposes greater integration of objective health-risk assessment with social norm-based health communication and moving beyond reliance on self-reported health outcomes. It also proposes that future research should prioritize longitudinal and field-based intervention studies that examine whether trusted messengers, identity-congruent framing and social norm-based nudges can translate collective religious experience into observable protective health behaviours. Systematic documentation of health communication and care-management practices is also needed to inform context-specific interventions. This article concludes that an integrated approach combining mass-gathering epidemiology, social psychology and behavioural science can inform health policy, strengthen programme design and improve the implementation of health promotion and risk-mitigation strategies at future religious mass gatherings.