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.
[1] 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.
The choice and actual sequence of methods used depends on the particular problem addressed.
[2] 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,[3] and Serge Moscovici's theories of social change and minority influence,[4] the theory of social representations,[5][6] as well as some approaches and methods from media studies, and discourse analysis, among others.
Societal psychology is characterised by fifteen key propositions: