Advancing the social psychology of rapid societal change

Abstract

In this introduction to the special section on rapid societal change, we highlight the challenges posed by rapid societal changes for social psychology and introduce the seven papers brought together in this special section. Rapid societal changes are qualitative transformations within a society that alter the prevailing societal state. Recent such changes include the election of right‐wing populist governments, the Arab Spring revolutions, and devastating civil wars in the Middle East. Conceptually, such events require consideration of how societal‐level events relate to more proximal psychological processes to bring about the often abrupt, non‐linear (as opposed to incremental and linear) nature of rapid societal change. They also require empirical approaches that allow such qualitative transformations to be captured and studied. This is true both in terms of directly addressing rapidly unfolding societal events in research, and in terms of how rapid, discontinuous change can be analysed. The papers in the special section help to address these issues through introducing novel theoretical and methodological approaches to studying rapid societal change, offering multiple perspectives on how macro‐level changes can both create, and be created by, micro‐level social psychological phenomena.

The Power of Political Déjà Vu: When Collective Action Becomes an Effort to Change the Future by Preventing the Return of the Past

“…Taken together, our results resonate with the growing concern in the collective action research regarding the ability of the established models to adequately explain rapid societal changes (e.g., Smith, Livingstone, & Thomas, 2019) and capitalize on the strength of more systematic, contextualized, and history‐informed approaches to the understanding of how narratives of the ingroup's victimization may spark nation‐wide antigovernment protests.…”

The Volatility of Collective Action: Theoretical Analysis and Empirical Data

“…More broadly, the diversity of forms of change and of action is much larger than that highlighted in this chapter (see also, Smith et al, 2019). Social life is always changing: Beyond the topic of activism that we review here, intensifying hierarchies and repression, civil wars, economic depressions, technological revolutions, scientific paradigm shifts, and disease epidemics are also important social changes, and we have not engaged these broader forms of change.…”

“…Yet much of the above work presents relatively incremental and linear models of change. In contrast, it is common for motivation to increase nonlinearly, from a slow burn or latent fury to a sudden volcanic eruption (Livingstone, 2014;Louis, La Macchia, et al, 2016;Smith et al, 2019).…”

“…Perhaps the most striking aspect of collective action, action taken on behalf of groups (Wright, Taylor, & Moghaddam, 1990), is that it is rarely immediately successful. Structural social changes can take years, decades, or centuries to achieve, and the "successes" of many social movements often prove to be short-term (Smith, Livingstone, & Thomas, 2019). This limitation led Louis (2009a) to call for greater attention to the antecedents, forms, and outcomes of collective action.…”

Mapping public health responses with attitude networks: the emergence of opinion‐based groups in the UK’s early COVID‐19 response phase

“…In times of social crises, attitudes rapidly coordinate and polarize (Smith et al, 2019) as people seek clarity from leaders and similar others (Kruglanski et al, 2006;Mueller, 1970). Thus, during the Brexit process, previously innocuous opinions like one's view of the EU became a catalyst for long-term realignments in British politics (Hobolt, Leeper, & Tilley, 2020).…”