Barriers to converting applied social psychology to bettering the human condition

Abstract

There is a problem with applied social psychology research—what might be considered the proverbial elephant-in-the-room—that it is the rare applied social psychology article, or set of articles, that is eventually implemented into intervention or policy to better the human condition. The aim of this editorial is to consider the barriers that arise when going from applied social psychology research to applications of the findings to an actual policy domain. There are barriers that are specific to the generalization of findings from a laboratory or field study to a practical setting (e.g., scalability) and there are barriers that concern the differences between different communities of experts (e.g., scientists, policy professionals) that are involved in the process of traversing the distance from scientific evidence to practice. The former concerns issues specific to scientific matters, which we first discuss. To the latter, the goals of an applied social scientist can be misaligned with the goals of a public policy professional, which need explication because they are rarely considered in our community. Thus, we discuss the various barriers for each community (science, policy) to understand why it is that so little applied social psychology research betters the human condition.