The outbreak of COVID-19 has put substantial pressure on individuals to adapt and change their behaviours. As the hope of a vaccine remains at least a year away, everyone is urged to take action to slow the spread of the virus. Thus, “flattening the curve” has become vital in preventing medical systems from being overrun, and it relies on massive collective action by citizens to follow specific public health measures such as physical distancing, hand washing, and physical isolation for vulnerable individuals. Despite the recommendations, the public has often been confronted with the reality that some individuals are not respecting them, including elected officials (Aguilar, 2020).

Dramatic social changes, such as the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the ongoing "Arab Spring" uprisings, are present throughout history and continue to affect millions of people every day. Unfortunately, there is a paucity of empirical 'real-world' research due in part to a lack of basic theory that might provide a framework to guide social psychological research. In the present paper, we argue that both psychology generally, and social psychology more specifically, have failed to adequately address the issue of dramatic social change. We argue that there is a need to move towards a new theoretical framework, one that is capable of addressing dramatic societal changes in terms of their impact at the individual level. As a first step toward achieving this goal, the present paper has two main objectives. We first offer a brief review of the extensive literature from the field of sociology, followed by a more in-depth analysis of the more limited psychological literature. Specifically, research on the topics of collective action, relative deprivation, and perceptions of social change are presented. Second, we outline the challenges associated with developing a heuristic framework for the psychology of social change.

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Teen pregnancy regularly brings about numerous changes in the life of the young mother. The most salient problem for teenage mothers, for example, is the lack of a supportive community. First, we will attempt to explain how little support from a community can lead to low levels of well-being. Secondly, we suggest solutions to overcome this problem. We propose that the young mothers perceive their situation as a Unique Situation. We advance the idea that the perception of living through a Unique Situation brings the young mothers to compare their situation to the one before their pregnancy, resulting in a decrease in well-being. This paper theorizes that by sharing a Unique Situation with others living through a similar situation, social comparisons will become available and consequently higher levels of well-being will be experienced.