The Psychology of Serious Everyday World Problems

Robert J. Sternberg is Professor of Psychology at Cornell University, and Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Heidelberg. His Ph.D. is from Stanford University and he holds thirteen honorary doctorates. He is a past winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology and the James and Cattell Awards from the Association for Psychological Science. Séamus A. Power is Associate Professor of Cultural Psychology at the University of Copenhagen and a Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of Inequality: The View from Manywheres (Cambridge, 2026). Fathali M. Moghaddam is Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University, and editor of the Progressive Psychology book series published by Cambridge University Press. His most recent books include The Psychology of Assimilation, Multiculturalism, and Omniculturalism (2024) and The New Immigration Challenge (Cambridge, 2026).

• Part I. Introduction: 1. The historical context of using psychology to study serious everyday world problems Robert J. Sternberg, Séamus A. Power and Fathali M. Moghaddam; Part II. Extremism, Polarization, and Conflict: 2. Extremism in everyday life: psychological roots, social pressures, and constructive redirection in the age of overdrive Sophia Moskalenko and Arie W. Kruglanski; 3. The perils of subjectivity: how the psychological animal is vulnerable to authoritarian rule Fathali M. Moghaddam; 4. The psychology of partisan polarization: partisan identity, animosity, and support for democracy Romeo Gray and Leonie Huddy; 5. United we stand, divided we fall: psychological approaches to understand and address intergroup conflict in a polarized world Aakash A. Chowkase, My Dao, Tyrone J. Sgambati, Shaunak V. Dantale, and Alejandra Ledesma; 6. Dangerous beliefs as social currency Kathleen Taylor; 7. Ordinary people in extreme situations: personality, self-selection, and the construction of extremist social environments Milan Obaidi and Simon Ozer; Part III. Deteriorating Condition of the Natural & Economic Worlds: 8. Some ideas about how to deal with serious everyday world problems: the example of climate change Joachim Funke; 9. Critical empowerment: awareness of the structural roots of climate change and fostering transformational solutions Edward J. R. Clarke and Frank Eckerle; 10. Decision-making in context: connecting political, cultural, and socioecological psychology to address poverty in global settings Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington and Monisha Dhingra; 11. Corruption in organizations: psychological explanations Kendra Dupuy; 12. The joys, sorrows, and possibilities of capitalism; Part IV. Specific World Problems Séamus A. Power; 13. The invisible potential: understanding systematic barriers to human potential as a serious world problem O. A. Desmet; 14. Football disorder as a serious everyday world problem: institutions, identity, and the psychology of interaction Clifford Stott, Alain Brechbühl, Mike Hope, Tim Willmann and Gian-Reto Pfister; 15. Possibility, peril, and phenomenology: a developmental lens on artificial intelligence's influence on young people Gabriel Velez; 16. STEM wisdom. The missing but indispensable ingredient in STEM education that can help save the world Robert J. Sternberg; Part V. Communications, Dialogue, and their Breakdown: 17. 'No knowledge about us without us': re-thinking individual and community development under contextual adversity Sandra Jovchelovitch, María Cecilia Dedios Sanguineti, and Laura Fonseca Durán; 18. The problem of dialogue: what psychology can tell us about why it's so hard to agree to disagree about politics Sandra Obradović; 19. Psychology and war Johannes Lang; Part VI. Discussion: 20. Discussion: overcoming serious everyday world problems as a form of world-making Séamus A. Power, Robert J. Sternberg and Fathali Moghaddam; Afterword: transformational psychology: a future direction for psychology in the study of serious everyday world problems Robert J. Sternberg and Arezoo Soleimani Dashtaki.