- Societal psychology
Societal psychology is a development within social psychology which empahsizes the all-embracing force of the social, institutional, and cultural environments, and with it the study of social phenomena in their own right as they affect, and are affected by, the members of the particular society. The term "societal psychology" was coined by
Hilde Himmelweit andGeorge Gaskell in 1990, in preference tosociological social psychology , to avoid a single alliance to one other discipline.Societal psychology is proffered as a counterweight to mainstream social psychology's concentration on the study of the individual's thoughts, feelings and actions, while paying little attention to the study of the environment, its culture and its institutions. Societal psychology seeks to address these issues and in so doing calls into question many of social psychology's basic assumptions.
A number of theories are held to be particularly relevant to the development of societal psychology, such as
Henri Tajfel 's theories ofsocial identity andintergroup relations , andSerge Moscovici 's theories of social change andminority influence , and the theory ofsocial representations .Societal psychology is characterised by fifteen key propositions:
*1. Human beings need to be studied in a sociocultural context
*2. The individual and the collective cannot be separated ontologically
*3. The ecology of the environment, its objective characteristics, needs to be studied alongside its mediated reality
*4. People create social organizations - but it is the social organizations that recast people
*5. Innovation is as much an imperative of the social system of relations to the environment as is conformity
*6. The aim of societal psychology is the development of conceptual frameworks or models rather than the forlorn search for invariant laws
*7. The need for theoretical pluralism
*8. There is a need to maintain a historical perspective
*9. Cross-fertilization between societal psychology and the other social sciences is indispensable for the adequate analysis of social phenomena and social systems
*10. There is a need for cross-fertilization among societal, developmental, and personality psychologists
*11. There is also a need for cross-fertilization between basic and applied research
*12. Societal psychology requires a systems approach
*13. The study of a social phenomenon requires a multilevel approach, at the macro as well as the micro level
*14. We need to accept and examine the implication that there is no such thing as value-free social research
*15. We need to adopt a much wider range of research toolsReferences
Himmelweit, H.T., & Gaskell, G. (Eds). (1990). "Societal psychology: Implications and scope". London: Sage
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