Tony Wainwright

Reflections on the Needs of Society and what Psychology can Offer

Where should the focus of applied psychology be in the coming decades? This was the question posed in the EFPA President’s lecture by Robert Roe to the 2011 European Congress of Psychology in Istanbul. At the re-launch of the EFPA Board of Prevention and Intervention in 2014 he further outlined his views and made the case that the major pressing problems of society fall to some degree outside the traditional focus of psychology, that has mainly been on individual, one to one, therapeutic approaches. Given the very substantial advances in psychological science, he argued that there had been a significant and growing mismatch between what society needs and what psychology could offer. Through my experience of the work of three Boards of the EFPA, I hope to illustrate some examples of how we can think about this ‘growing mismatch’.

He is a past chair of the British Psychological Society’s Ethics committee and a member of the EFPA Board of Ethics, the Board of Human Rights and Psychology, and the Board of Promotion and Prevention.