Tipping Points. Deep Roots and Contemporary Challenges in Psychology

As an object of study, tipping points raise several questions for psychology. Unless one wants to use this term as a generic metaphor to indicate sudden change, any attempt to better define this concept has to take into account some fundamental psychological features including acceptance, promotion or resistance to change, the relationship between quantitative and qualitative transformations, the dynamics between individual, social and societal levels, and the relationship between psychological and environmental changes. All these facets refer to classical approaches and theorisations developed in the early 1900s as well as to more recent systemic models, including societal and cultural psychology approaches and proposals for a socio-ecological psychology. In this chapter, we will identify points of contact with classics such as Insights and Dynamics of field forces, Cognitive dissonance, Grievance, Bounded rationality, Coping, and Socio-dynamical approaches to social representations. Moreover, looking at the recent literature, we will highlight advances in our understanding of tipping points provided by cognitive, socioecological and systemic models. Common to all these views is the attempt to describe and explain the processes that favour or hinder qualitative transformation, both in terms of its perception and its enactment. In this chapter, we will provide an overview of the different approaches mentioned, which should be read more as an agenda for future research rather than an exhaustive review of state of the art.