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 and George Gaskell in 1990, in preference to sociological 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.
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's theories of social identity and intergroup relations, and Serge Moscovici's theories of social change and minority influence, the theory of social representations, as well as some approaches and methods from media studies, and discourse analysis, among others.
Societal psychology is characterised by fifteen key propositions: