Rethinking current models in social psychology: A Bayesian framework to understand dramatic social change

Abstract

Dramatic social change (DSC) is the new normal, affecting millions of people around the world. However, not all events plunge societies into DSC. According to de la Sablonnière (2017, Front. Psychol., 8, 1), events that have a rapid pace of change, that rupture an entire group's social and normative structures, and that threaten the group's cultural identity will result in DSC. This perspective provokes important unanswered questions: What is the chance that a DSC will occur if an event takes place? And, when will other societal states arise from such events? Addressing these questions is pivotal for a genuine psychology of social change to emerge. The goal of this article was to describe a methodology that attempts to answer these questions via a probabilistic decision tree within a Bayesian framework. According to our analysis, a DSC should occur 6.25% of the time that an event takes place in a stable society (68.75% of the time for incremental social change, 12.5% for inertia, and 12.5% for stability). The Bayesian probabilistic decision tree could be applied to specific event and thus serve as a guide for a programmatic study of social change and ultimately inform policymakers who need to plan and prepare for events that lead to DSC.

United We Stand, Divided We Fall: Sociopolitical Predictors of Physical Distancing and Hand Hygiene During the COVID‐19 Pandemic

“…The COVID‐19 pandemic has increased the urgency of going beyond the individual to understand health behaviors. Societal crises such as pandemics weaken the fundamental structures of society (de la Sablonnière, Lina, & Cárdenas, 2019) and therefore demand a strong sense of group or collective commitment in order to overcome the crisis; put simply, “united we stand or divided we fall.” Moreover, successfully managing the pandemic requires that a great majority of the population rapidly adopts government‐endorsed (or mandated) health behaviors and, importantly, sustains these behaviors until a vaccine has been succesfully rolled out, effective therapeutics have become available, or the pandemic has subsided. This widespread collective behavior change may most readily be achieved in the presence of sociopolitical factors that emphasize being part of an organized, shared, group effort, a sense of social cohesiveness, as opposed to an individual qua individual effort.…”

Advancing the social psychology of rapid societal change

“…Finally, de la Sablonnière and colleagues () take on an important conceptual challenge: that of defining dramatic social change and the conditions that underlie it. de la Sablonnière et al .…”

Dilemmas of resistance: How concerns for cultural aspects of identity shape and constrain resistance among minority groups

“…The relationship between social change and the experience of existential threat to cultural identity is also emphasized in de la Sablonnière and colleagues' typology of social change (de la Sablonnière, 2017;de la Sablonnière et al, 2019;de la Sablonnière & Taylor, 2020). On the one hand, a perceived threat to cultural identity is a key condition for what de la Sablonnière (2017) terms dramatic social change, defined as "a situation where a rapid event leads to a profound societal transformation and produces a rupture in the equilibrium of the social and normative structures and changes/threatens the cultural identity of group" (p.12).…”