Public Service Psychology in the 1990s

Abstract

Psychology in the 1990s is undergoing a variety of changes in the United States and elsewhere, particularly on the continent of Europe. Politically, Europe is a complex mosaic of national states. From the states that formerly constituted the Soviet Union to sizable countries such as France and tiny states such as Liechtenstein, Europeans are known to have a strong commitment to their country of origin and to the respective educational, political, and public policy assumptions inherent therein. With the recent cataclysmic political changes in Eastern Europe and the emergence of the European Community, cultural and philosophical influences will doubtless be strongly felt in European public service psychology well into the 21st century. Many of the founding fathers of American psychology came from Germanic/Scandinavian and Jewish European communities. Moghaddam [1] has suggested that there are three worlds of psychological research and practice: the first consists of the United States alone; the second, of the other nations; and the third, of the nations. He goes on to note that the traffic in psychological knowledge has been unidirectional, from the United States to the other developed nations including the European community and then, to a lesser extent, to the developing countries. This could mean that other countries import psychological ideas from the United States that may not be very relevant to their own cultures. Of course,