Public Psychology: Introduction to the Special Issue

Public Significance Statement In a time of extraordinary global crises and major threats to the legitimacy of psychological knowledge, this special issue invites psychologists to embrace the challenge of recommitting to publicly engaged and public-facing psychology. This article introduces the special issue and highlights key themes of an emergent public psychology framework. Psychology's role in public life and social issues has been of longstanding concern throughout the discipline. In a historical moment of tremendous social, political, and economic strife and a global pandemic, this special issue of American Psychologist seeks to extend important discourse about the concept of public psychology. The articles included in the special issue address a range of interconnected themes, including: (a) centering social problems, (b) engaging diverse publics in knowledge creation, (c) communicating and democratizing psychological knowledge, and (d) rethinking what constitutes psychology. In this introduction, the guest editors contextualize the special issue, identify its aims, and highlight the key contributions of the included articles. The guest editors argue that realizing an expansive and transformative public psychology will require structural, substantive changes within the discipline to place community concerns at the center of psychology. Nonetheless, bolstered by the insights of the special issue's contributors, the guest editors conclude with cautious optimism that psychology has much to offer in addressing the most pressing social problems of the 21st century.