Societal psychology is a development within social psychology which emphasizes 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

Hilde Himmelweit

Hildegard Therese Himmelweit, née Litthauer was a German social psychologist who had a major influence on the development of the discipline in Britain....

 and George Gaskell

George Gaskell

George Gaskell is a British Professor of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science . Formerly Director of the Methodology Institute, he is now Deputy Director for Planning and Resources and a member of the LSE Council and Court of Governors...

 in 1990, in preference to sociological social psychology, to avoid a single alliance to one other discipline.

Societal psychology is proffer

Proffer

The word proffer is derived from Anglo-French "por-", forth, and offrir, to offer. The act of proffering involves making an offer prior to any formal negotiations....

ed 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.

Research within the framework of societal psychology is not restricted to a few psychological methods, such as experimentation. Scholars in the field use the whole range of qualitative and quantitative social science methods and attempt to triangulate and validate their findings by different methods. The choice and actual sequence of methods used depends on the particular problem addressed.

A number of theories are held to be particularly relevant to the development of societal psychology, such as Henri Tajfel

Henri Tajfel

Henri Tajfel was a British social psychologist, best known for his pioneering work on the cognitive aspects of prejudice and social identity theory, as well as being one of the founders of the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology.-Early life in Poland:Tajfel grew up in Poland...

's theories of social identity

Social identity

A social identity is the portion of an individual's self-concept derived from perceived membership in a relevant social group. As originally formulated by Henri Tajfel and John Turner in the 1970s and 80s, social identity theory introduced the concept of a social identity as a way in which to...

 and intergroup relations, and Serge Moscovici

Serge Moscovici

Serge Moscovici is a Romanian-born French social psychologist, currently the director of the Laboratoire Européen de Psychologie Sociale , which he co-founded in 1974 at the Maison des sciences de l'homme in Paris...

's theories of social change and minority influence

Minority influence

Minority influence, a form of social influence, takes place when a minority, like an individual, influences a majority to accept the minority's beliefs or behaviour. There are two types of social influence: majority influence and minority influence...

, the theory of social representations

Social representations

A social representation is a stock of values, ideas, beliefs, and practices that are shared among the members of groups and communities. Social Representations Theory is a body of theory within Social Psychology and Sociological social psychology...

, as well as some approaches and methods from media studies

Media studies

Media studies is an academic discipline and field of study that deals with the content, history and effects of various media; in particular, the 'mass media'. Media studies may draw on traditions from both the social sciences and the humanities, but mostly from its core disciplines of mass...

, and discourse analysis

Discourse analysis

Discourse analysis , or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken, signed language use or any significant semiotic event....

, among others.

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 and methodological 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 tools