University of Bath, UK.
University of Exeter, UK.
Br J Soc Psychol. 2019 Jan;58(1):33-44. doi: 10.1111/bjso.12292. Epub 2018 Nov 20.
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.
在这篇关于快速社会变革的专题介绍中，我们强调了快速社会变革给社会心理学带来的挑战，并介绍了汇集在这个专题中的七篇论文。快速的社会变革是指社会内部的定性转变，改变了当前的社会状态。最近的此类变化包括右翼民粹主义政府的选举、阿拉伯之春革命以及中东毁灭性的内战。从概念上讲，此类事件需要考虑社会层面的事件如何与更接近的心理过程相关联，以带来快速社会变革通常是突然的、非线性的（而不是渐进的和线性的）性质。它们还需要实证方法来捕捉和研究这种定性转变。无论是在研究中直接解决快速展开的社会事件方面，还是在分析快速、不连续的变化方面，都是如此。该专题中的论文通过引入研究快速社会变革的新理论和方法，从多个角度探讨了宏观层面的变化如何既可以创造，也可以被微观层面的社会心理现象所创造。
