Humans live in collectives, and our beliefs, emotions, decisions, and behaviors depend on and shape those of others around us. To understand collectives and tackle the current societal challenges from group radicalization and polarization to the spread of misinformation and group violence, psychologists must go beyond the traditional focus on the individual mind. This is even more pressing given the pace of the digital transformation of our society, as new information and communication technologies reshape how we interact, create new networked structures of humans and machines, and provide a digital breeding ground for new kinds of collective behavior.

Psychology can offer indispensable knowledge about human collective phenomena from belief dynamics and emotion amplification to collective problem-solving and crowd behavior. However, no single discipline can fully explain collectives, and theories and methods from psychology can be fruitfully integrated with those from other social and cognitive sciences, including anthropology, economics, neuroscience, organizational science, and sociology. This integration effort can be aided by modeling frameworks developed in biology, computer science, statistical physics, and applied mathematics. This special issue offers a variety of perspectives suggesting how interdisciplinary collaborations can lead to better theorizing, modeling, and empirical research on human collectives.

D. Garcia, M. Galesic, H. Olsson, The Psychology of Collectives, Perspectives on Psychological Science 19(2) (2023) 316-319.