Hostile and favorable societal climates for self-change: some lessons for policy makers

Voting behavior, fashion wear, eating habits, exercise, and hygiene: we do not live in a societal limbo; rather our actions are influenced and affected by societal values, trends, commercials and campaigns. From our daily experience it seems plausible that social and cognitive processes go hand in hand. In the area of natural-recovery research, decisional processes of self-change are often seen as occurring within the individual or from interactions between individuals rather than from societal forces. This is not surprising, given the influence of clinical psychology and psychiatry as well as the methodological difficulties involved in measuring the impact of society on individual behavior.