Macro-level Interventions: Psychology, social policy, and societal influence processes

As a discipline, psychology has focused primarily on individuals, families, and small groups. This micro-level focus, although productive, sits at odds with the aspirations of many psychologists to make a positive difference in regard to the greatest contemporary problems facing humankind. These problems, which include armed conflict, racism, sexism, poverty, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic, among many others, occur at macro-social levels involving large numbers of people from local communities, nations, ethnically diverse regions, and even the world. Since the challenges affect significant numbers of people, interventions need to occur to scale if any significant impact is to felt, and scale is normally achieved only through macro-level policy implementation or large scale programatic intervention carried out with the support of policy makers and other major stakeholders.

This chapter (an excerpt from International psychology series. Toward a global psychology: Theory, research, intervention, and pedagogy edited by M. J. Stevens & U. P. Gielen), endeavours to show how psychology has the potential to address these challenges at the macro-level not through the sorts of individual and small-group interventions that are traditional in the discipline, but through macro-level approaches associated with social policies and societal influence processes. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first lays the conceptual foundation and provides a critical lens for thinking about how psychology can inform our approach to macro-level problems. The second examines social policy work and massscale psychosocial interventions as two kinds of macro-level intervention. The final provides examples of psychologically informed interventions and discusses their role, impact, and challenges.