Transformational Psychology

Transactional Psychology

When we reflect upon the founders and prominent exponents of schools of psychology, they are leaders who were, or at least appear to have been, passionate about the work they were doing—they each were trying to change the field of psychology, and perhaps the world, for the better by introducing a new way of looking at people and how they think, feel, and act. However, over time, many of these perspectives—whatever their original aspirations—have ended up being used primarily to help individuals adapt to existing social rules and institutions: learning how to set culturally rewarded goals and achieve them. Even psychologists are not immune to the same reward structures that they study: the profession itself powerfully nudges scholars and practitioners toward transactional work. The following paragraphs illustrate how people gradually become transactional in their field of work, rather than aiming to work toward making a positive change in the world.

Some psychologists—whether in research or in practice—start their careers with an orientation that aims to change the world for the better, but then the world gets the better of them. There are so many external pressures that impinge upon psychologists. These pressures lead scholars to have a transactional mindset. The scholars are besieged with institutional and other expectations, and the expectations continually reinforce a transactional mentality that can carry over into the kinds of research they do in relation to the kinds of rewards or punishments they expect to receive. For academics, there are the pressures of getting hired, tenured, multiply promoted, preparing classes, dealing with student ratings, dealing with seeking publication and getting rejections from journals (which are pretty much inevitable), seeking funding from granting agencies and getting rejections (which also are pretty much inevitable), doing tedious administrative chores, going to faculty meetings, correcting papers, including ones that in current times may have been written by AI, and on and on the list goes. All these pressures occur while one must deal with salaries that are usually subpar and, for adjuncts, almost always way below what is needed to maintain one’s standard of living. For practitioners, there are the problems of getting hired or established in a practice, finding and keeping clients, dealing with regulatory agencies, dealing with insurance companies, dealing with the overhead of maintaining a physical space, keeping one’s credentials updated, and keeping up one’s income during lean times.

The general point is that, however one may start out, one may find oneself, more and more, becoming transactional in one’s work. You give something; you get something; you give a bit more; you get a bit more (or at least, you hope you do). You work for your salary (if you have one), for renown (whether as a researcher or as a practitioner), for reimbursements, for anything you need to do to hold onto your job or, at times, to find another one. Work can very easily become primarily transactional, essentially “tit-for-tat.” Often, whatever idealism one may have started with is crushed by the pressures of the world. And if the pressures of the world are not enough, sometimes those pressures come from within us, as we begin to wonder why we are doing what we are doing and whether it is even worthwhile continuing to do it.

One often finds that being creative—to the extent that it is even possible—is not rewarded but rather ignored or even punished (Sternberg, 2025a). Instead of one’s creativity being recognized and appreciated, people often question it, resent it, or even disparage it. One may realize that this castigation of creativity is how the world often works, but the lack of reward for creativity nevertheless stings. Indeed, one begins to realize, according to some theories (e.g., Sternberg et al., 2002), that the work which is most valued is work that is a small increment beyond what has been done before which threatens no one. And if one tries to be wise in one’s work—balanced, non-ideological, unbiased, fair, impartial—one may find oneself the target of ideological groups, from the political left or right or from groups adhering to powerful professional paradigms—that attack one precisely because one is trying to be balanced and fair. It is hard to be wise in an unjust world, as Socrates and so many of his successors—Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi, Marie Curie, Malala Yousafzai—have found out the hard way, often paying for their wisdom with their health or even their lives (see Sternberg, 2024). In today’s world, as in the past, it is often the wise people who are most targeted, not only by colleagues, but also by autocratic governments, usually posing as “democracies,” that seek to crush opposition.

The pressure to be transactional starts before one’s career begins, with college and university education more and more being looked at as a transactional venture. Students pay money to educational institutions in the hope of obtaining good employment (Fischman & Gardner, 2022; Greenberg, 2022) and a desired future standard of living. The students expect a return on investment.

Is there something about the work itself that leads scholars and practitioners alike to become transactional? We believe that the short-term reward system favors those who stick within established norms and do not rock the boat. With regard to publications and grant proposals, submitting something that is paradigm-defying is likely to upset reviewers and other evaluators, a fact recognized long ago by Kuhn (1970). A new junior faculty member has only a short amount of time to impress their senior colleagues with their abilities, and the system scarcely encourages creative risk-taking, especially when one metaphorically steps into others’ shoes in taking risks. Long-term projects that may yield special dividends are discouraged because they may not be finished before one’s promotion or tenure meeting. And taking risks in teaching can be the kiss of death if the students or administration do not like what they see or hear. For practitioners, one needs to establish a client base but risk that base if the practitioner uses unusual therapeutic interventions that may ultimately end up sabotaging their career. The result is that, regardless of one’s particular specialization or approach to psychology, the pattern that is set down is, metaphorically, to color within the lines.

The transactional goals may be set by others, by oneself, or by a combination of both, but whichever way things go, the reward system benefits most those with high tacit knowledge, or practical intelligence, about how the field works and what one can do to succeed so as to maximize one’s number of allies and to minimize one’s number of enemies (see Sternberg & Horvath, 1999).

Transactional contributions do not necessarily pay off. Those who attempt to be transactional may not be identified as successful or may be identified as either inertly or incompatibly transactional.

In the first undesirable case, the scholar or practitioner does whatever they believe it takes to succeed, but it just does not work or works only at a barely satisfactory level. One is unsuccessfully transactional. For example, most work in psychology is hardly cited at all, and many scholars are barely known outside their own institutions. The work may be viewed as bad, off-track, or as too weak to be worthy of attention.

A second undesirable outcome is when, from the standpoint of one’s institution or field, one’s contributions are inert—they are not going anywhere. One may work hard but to no avail. The work is not viewed as bad, but it is not even recognized as being serious work.

A third undesirable outcome is one in which one’s work is incompatibly transactional. One is seen as doing work, perhaps serious work, but not what the institution or field values at the time. Perhaps the work is viewed as dated, or as in a field other than psychology, or as following a school of psychology that is not highly regarded. In each case, the attempt to be transactional fails due to a mismatch between what the individual values and what the institution values. For example, a professor may be a highly competent researcher but be in a teaching-oriented institution where research is devalued or seen as irrelevant to the mission of the institution. Conversely, the professor may be a great teacher but not be seen as a serious researcher. Or a practitioner may use a kind of therapy (e.g., psychoanalysis) that is not valued in a cognitively oriented group practice. In these cases, the transactions fail to accomplish what the individual had hoped they would accomplish.

Sometimes, as professionals age, they become disenchanted, dated, or simply out of sync with the times. What the professionals once did is no longer valued, and their value to the institution or field is seen as lesser or obsolete. In these cases, the individual may be ignored, punished, or encouraged to move on to other employment or to retirement.

Transactionalism can pervade a field as well as the career of an individual. When new paradigms start out, their followers often have a sense of mission and of bringing something new and valuable into the world. But as Kuhn (1970) recognized, paradigms have a lifespan. They do not last forever. And over time, they become worn out, spent, and eventually in need of refreshment or replacement. If one works in a spent paradigm and has no ideas for a new one, or at least a new one that has a chance of broad acceptance, one may find oneself spinning one’s wheels and doing strictly transactional work because that is all that the paradigm has left to offer. The work tends to become replicative or to represent small incremental advances on existing work (Sternberg et al., 2002) and so to leave the field, and its practitioners, realizing that what they have to offer is not what the world needs; but they may not realize, at least right away, what it is that the world needs at the time the work is being done.

There is nothing inherently wrong with transactional psychology, which can encompass a wide variety of work that is being done at a given time and in a given place. But often its practitioners recognize that the work they are producing fulfills none of the ideals they may once have had, or that they thought might develop through their work as the years go by. It has become a conceptually exhausted transactional psychology. There may be a feeling that something is missing—that one is not making the kind and level of contribution of which one is capable. And a strictly transactional orientation may lead to burnout and a desire to do something else that will provide one with more personal and professional satisfaction.

The transactional paradigm is not a “replacement” for any of the traditional schools of psychology described earlier. Rather, it crosscuts those schools and other schools of psychology. It refers more to a state of mind than to a particular approach. That state of mind is one where: (a) the scholar or practitioner does work in exchange for rewards; (b) the rewards are forthcoming in part or in whole or, in unlucky circumstances, are not provided; (c) the rewards, if given, serve as reinforcements for more work of the same kind, thereby leading to (d) more work of more or less the same kind, in a potentially endless loop.

The adoption of a transactional-psychology framework for one’s research is not merely a personal choice among options: It is an option that is heavily favored by most environments. The scholar might adopt it because they believe that it is what is expected, or even necessary for survival as a scholar in a typical college or university environment. For example, one typically is expected to teach courses, publish research, and do certain administrative tasks. The expectations are transactional, and if a scholar does not meet them, their employment may be in danger or perhaps simply terminated. If a therapist does not serve their clients, their job may be short-lived. The question is not whether one will do transactional work—if one is paid, most likely one will have to do such work. The question rather is whether, in addition to the transactional work, one will go beyond it, as discussed below.

The transactionality of much of psychology and of the individuals in it must be understood, like so much else, as a person x task x situation x audience interaction. The diverse environmental contexts in which people live and work (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) reward transactionalism in a way that, at least now, they do not reward transformationalism. In general, psychologists, like everyone else, have bills to pay and families to feed, and may adapt a transactional orientation toward their work because that is where the rewards, or at least the extrinsic rewards, are.

Much of the world is based on exchange. Even work with loftier goals may still have an element of exchange in it. Who does not want to see their career advanced for good work (see Colby & Damon, 1992; Damon, 2009; Gardner et al., 2001; Peterson & Seligman, 2004)? But at a time when so much in the world is in disarray—politically, socially, economically, culturally, climatologically, psychologically, and in other ways—is there a possibility that psychology potentially can offer something more than just transactional, tit-for-tat work? We believe that it is possible for psychology to transform itself in this way, just as society in general can transform itself (Glăveanu, 2020, 2023). That is the subject of the next section of the article.

What are the basic tenets of a transformational psychology?

Transformational psychology has some basic tenets. Here are five principal ones.

(1) The world is not anywhere close to where it needs to be. It is on a path that is often not world-constructive, but rather often is, in some ways, world-destructive, a path in which, ultimately, everyone will lose to a lesser but, more likely, to a greater degree. This is our view; others may disagree. But it is also a view, with respect to just one issue, the state of democracy, of many leading world experts (e.g., Albright, 2018; Applebaum, 2024; Gorokhovskaia et al., 2023; Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, 2023; Lipman-Blumen, 2006; Martín-Baró, 2017; Mounk, 2018). Martín-Baró (2017), in particular, speaks of the importance of psychologists challenging societal systems that are failing many of their members. That list of experts does not take into account those who are extremely worried about climate change, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, air pollution, water pollution, poverty, economic polarization, and myriad other issues. So, such a comment may sound too pessimistic or even catastrophic in tone, but as we write, there is a war in Iran that is causing global havoc, for which the rationales have changed by the day (Mazzetti et al., 2026). We believe that our characterization is accurate, while recognizing that others may see things differently. Transformational psychologists, whatever their views, will certainly see great room for improvement in multiple areas. What might bring us all down is not clear, whether it be climate change making the world uninhabitable, one or more pandemics killing people off, pollution damage to health, wars and other violence of people against people, accidental or terrorist detonation of weapons of mass destruction, some combination of these threats, or other causes. Current work on misinformation and disinformation is an important example of transformational psychology (e.g., Edelson et al., 2024; Lu et al., 2023; Maertens et al., 2021; Pennycook & Rand, 2021; Roozenbeek & van der Linden, 2024; van der Linden, 2023). This field is an example of a seriously pressing world problem that psychologists are confronting and trying, in a transformational way, to address and propose solutions.

(2) Psychologists not only have a role to play in helping to guide the world from this destructive path, but also have a responsibility, as really every citizen of the world should have. Psychologists, especially social psychologists, dating back to the early part of the 20th century, recognized that their work could be used to understand the world and potentially to make it better (e.g., Hartshorne & May, 1928). Unfortunately, not all the studies followed the ethical canons that we would expect today, such as the Little Albert experiment on conditioned emotional responses (e.g., Watson & Rayner, 1920), the Festinger et al. (1956) prophecy study, or even what may be the most consequential experiments ever done in social psychology, the Milgram (1963, 2009) obedience experiments. Watson and Rayner conditioned a boy to fear white rats, but when the fear generalized to other white furry objects, such as white rabbits, there is no evidence that Watson and Rayner sought to reverse the conditioning. Milgram sought to study obedience in order to understand how people could have obeyed the Nazis, but persuaded participants to cause harm (or so the participants thought) to a learner, and without adequate informed consent. Festinger et al. (1956) studied how, when cult prophecies fail, the believers in the cult may become even more fervent believers in the failed prophecy than before the prophecy fails—but they, as researchers, perhaps inadvertently, influenced the results of the study. The lesson is that, to improve the world, one must do so in a way that does not sacrifice ethical practice and the well-being of the participants for the sake of some abstract greater good. The Robber’s Cave study of Sherif (1956, 1958; Sherif et al., 1961), which showed how enforced intergroup cooperation could be used to reduce intergroup conflict, was a particularly notable example of how psychology could be used to the betterment of people’s understanding of how to make the world a more cooperative place in which to live. But the study also created, at one point, artificially induced bad will between groups of children.

(3) Betterment of the world can be achieved through a wide variety of subfields and methodologies of psychology. There are no particular content restrictions on the operation of transformational psychology. Studies such as those by Sherif, as mentioned above, or by Kelman and Barclay (1963) on how to increase trust among enemies, or by Lewin et al. (1939) on aggressive behavior, emanate from social psychology. A problem with such experimental studies is that they might not successfully make it through contemporary Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). Janis’s (1972) classic work on groupthink circumvented this problem by doing retrospective case studies. Abelson and Carroll (1965), in simulating a right-wing “true believer,” also circumvented the problem by using a computer simulation, which did not require human participants. But there is much to be learned from social psychology. Gilovich and Ross (2016) published an entire book on how people can benefit in their lives from social-psychological insights. For example, we tend to over-attribute the behavior of other people to their undesirable personality traits rather than to the situations in which they find themselves; we often have a naïve belief in the validity of our own observations—that how we see things is how they really are; we often believe that the likelihood of something being true is a function of how confident we are of its truth; and we often assume that disagreement shows bad faith on the part of others (but not of ourselves). If we are dealing with others, our fallacies about how they behave make it harder to deal with them positively, whether they are within our own culture or in another one.

Clinical-psychological insights also have a long history of being used to seek improvements in the world. For example, cognitive therapy has been used to help countless people recover from depression, in its original form (A. T. Beck et al., 1987) and combined with behavioral therapy (J. S. Beck, 2011), but A. T. Beck also applied ideas from his clinical work to combating hate in the world (A. T. Beck, 1999). In particular, Beck showed how hate often stems from cognitive distortions, and the spread of hate often originates in willful distortions by purposeful manipulators. Taking a more social-psychological approach, Sternberg (2026a) likewise has argued that hate is often purposely spread by leading people not only to engage in cognitive distortion, but also to feel a negation of intimacy (revulsion, repulsion) toward real or imagined enemies, to develop a passionate distaste and even loathing for these real or imagined enemies, and to become cognitively committed to their hate. A transformational goal is to combat hate through at least three mechanisms: (a) applying wisdom, (b) replacing hate with love, and (c) showing how the people one comes to hate are often no different from oneself and can become allies instead of enemies.

(4) Transformational work seeks what is better not only for the individual—which is closer to the domain of positive psychology—but also for the world in terms of achieving a common good that balances the interests of stakeholders in relevant decisions and that seeks long-term as well as short-term solutions to pressing world problems. Where transformational psychology perhaps differs most from conventional positive-psychological approaches is that transformational psychology is oriented toward making individual lives better, but in a way that also potentially improves everyone else’s lot in life. Transformational psychology should help to identify and dismantle systemic barriers to people’s achieving their individual and mutual goals, and to dismantle the exploitation of particular targeted groups. In this respect, it draws on critical psychology (Parker, 1999, 2007; Prilleltensky & Nelson, 2002). Psychology, transformationalists believe, has perhaps been too focused on results for individuals in ways that may ignore or even disadvantage the collective. For example, psychotherapy can be used to improve individuals’ lives (e.g., Pucci, 2006) and to create happiness. Happiness is an admirable goal: There are countless books available on increasing personal happiness, many of them by eminent positive psychologists and their associates (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Diener & Biswas-Diener, 2008; Fredrickson, 2009; Gilbert, 2006; Lyubomirsky, 2007; Seligman, 2002, 2011; Staub, 1978, 1979). The audience seems to be large. The most popular course, ever, at Yale University (Shimer, 2018), has been one called Psychology and the Good Life on campus, and called The Science of Well-Being online. It has been designed and taught by Professor Laurie Santos. More than 4.6 million people apparently have taken the course, which is offered for free by Coursera (Nafría, 2024). Books on other topics, such as creativity, have also focused on how these other topics, such as creativity, can make one happier (e.g., Kaufman, 2023).

It is admirable that positive psychology and other related lines of work have concrete, empirically supported techniques for improving people’s happiness. Apparently, there is a tremendous market for such work. That is not surprising, given the current unhappy state of much in the world. But transformational psychology would place happiness only as a subsidiary outcome rather than as a principal aim of its application. The goal of transformational psychology is to make the world better and, hopefully, for people to achieve some happiness through seeing the world change for the better. Many of the most transformational (and wisest) people in recent history—including those mentioned earlier (Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Alexei Navalny, Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi, Malala Yousafzai), did not necessarily have the happiest lives, or in some cases, happy lives at all. But they made the world a better place for countless millions of people. The goal of transformational psychology is to understand how individuals such as these made this improvement in the world possible and, hopefully, to offer other people roads to world-changing that will make things better not just for them, individually, but for everyone. In an individualistic society and world, the risk is that people’s focus will end with themselves. But happiness is separate from making the world better. Truly awful people—evil dictators, torturers, criminals—perhaps can achieve some measure of happiness through positive-psychological techniques. The goal of transformational psychology is not to make them happy, however, but to lead them, and others, to change their destructive ways toward positive and constructive ones. Transformational psychology is not about making an individual’s life happier, perhaps at the expense of others. It is about making their life happier through the happiness that comes, metaphorically, from a rising tide raising all ships.

(5) Transformational psychology is about seeking a long-term as well as a short-term good free of selfish narrow self- and group interests, deception, power plays, posturing, and perfidy. Any number of individuals, especially leaders of various kinds, claim to seek a common good. For many of them, the only question is whether they are engaged in self-deception, other-deception, or both. They either put their own self-interest first, or the interests of their family, or the interests of the group with which they identify (same religion, socioeconomic stratum, nationality, political party, ideology, or whatever). There may not be many leaders who currently seek a genuine common good, but transformational psychology would seek to develop more of them. One might call them “idealistic,” but they nobly pursue an ideal that will benefit all. An enormous problem in the world is that people seem to wish not for transformational leaders, but for pseudo-transformational ones—ones who pretend to be making the world better while making it worse. The attainment of a common good does not require everyone to quickly, or even after some reflection, agree on the end-product, or even to have the same value system. It does require negotiation in good faith for the benefit of all, not just the select few, and to achieve an outcome that will benefit all in the long term, not just the short term. And it requires honesty rather than self-interested deception of others and sometimes, oneself.

Many, perhaps most, people prefer leaders who are not transformational, not wise, and not generous of spirit. The leaders they prefer are those who could be identified as pseudo-transformational. These leaders are toxic and, ultimately, harmful to the people who prefer them (Bass, 1985; Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999; Conger, 1990; Kellerman, 2004; Lipman-Blumen, 2006; Sternberg, 2021c; Sternberg et al., 2025; Tourish, 2013; Örtenblad, 2021).

It is the job of transformational psychology to figure out not only the characteristics of bad leaders and why people prefer such leaders, but also, more importantly, what to do about this conundrum, because the world cannot become better if people keep choosing leaders who make it worse. Why do people prefer bad leaders, and how can we change their preferences?

The study of why individuals support toxic leaders is an application of transformational psychology to leadership. For example, transformational education would teach young people why so many of them prefer bad leaders, and how they might change their ways of thinking. These reasons for preferring toxic leaders stem, in part, from people’s credulity (Gilbert et al., 1993; Pennycook & Rand, 2019; Sternberg, 2025b), their often-justified fear of what will happen to them if they do not fall into line (Sternberg et al., 2025a), their desire to be an accepted part of a conforming crowd of believers (Sternberg, 2025a), and their frustration with the ways things are and their passionate desire for change. But there is more, according to Lipman-Blumen (2006) and others, and the “more” includes (a) attraction to the self-confidence of narcissists, (b) credulously believing bedazzling but false stories about how the narcissistic leaders will make their lives better, (c) succumbing to greed or the belief that other people’s misfortunes will be their good fortune, (d) falling for the old canard that it’s the outsiders who are responsible for all of people’s woes (however, “outsiders” are conveniently defined by the authoritarian), and (e) people’s tolerance of corruption, incompetence, and stark malfeasance as being just the way things are and always will be.

The job of transformational psychology is to try to inoculate citizens against their own metaphorical mental “autoimmune illnesses,” whereby they work against themselves. Scholars have come a long way toward understanding how to accomplish this goal (McGuire, 1961, 1964; Roozenbeek & van der Linden, 2019, 2024; van der Linden et al., 2017; van der Linden et al., 2020). Some transformational research has been done: Now, schools need to use it.

Another job of transformational psychology is to teach young people to be continually questioning, and not merely to be credulous, with regard to authorities, particularly those individuals in positions of authority who have no expertise and have destructive ideas that they view as signs of their imagined expertise (Sternberg, 2025b; 2014). Literary authors such as Sinclair Lewis in It Can’t Happen Here (2014), Arthur Koestler (1941) in Darkness at Noon, George Orwell (1949) in 1984, Philip K. Dick (1962) in The Man in the High Castle, Philip Roth (2005) in The Plot Against America, and Margaret Atwood (1985) in The Handmaid’s Tale all recognized how easily people can succumb to cynical, manipulative, and often brutal authoritarians. Many of these novels were adumbrated by Franz Kafka's (1937) classic work, The Trial. In the novel, a nameless and faceless bureaucracy, which many people do not even know exists, holds arbitrary power, including that of life or death, over them. Meanwhile, they live in a world in which nothing seems to make much sense; but it is a world that people accept as it is, nevertheless.

These literary authors were writing, in part, in response to the events of their times, but many of the same patterns of submissive and even obsequious behavior, driven by self-interest, fear, and susceptibility to manipulation, are happening today in multiple nations. People will do a lot to achieve significance (Kruglanski et al., 2022). As long-time dictators entrench their power, and new ones come into power, the same patterns of fear, submissive behavior, cowardice, and learned helplessness that the world has seen before are reappearing quickly and all too pervasively. We no longer have to ask in stunned disbelief how Nazi Germany could have happened, if we ever had to ask. We can see the answer all around us.

Transformational psychology has a role to play in how to recognize and combat such behavior (Sternberg et al., 2025; Sternberg & Fischer, 2023). How? We believe that the first step is for psychologists to find the courage in themselves to study transgressive behavior on the part of nations as well as of individuals and to call it out when it occurs. This step may sound minor, but the senior author of this article has not written any article—literally, none—on the topic of national transgressive behavior for which at least one reviewer or editor has not expressed concern about, or objected to, the author discussing contemporary national transgressive behavior without the author's being urged to engage in “bothsidesism” (or “allsideism”). He has been strongly urged to see all moral issues as having two (or more) sides that each deserves to be explained, respected, and viewed as having both positive and negative sides. Or he has been chastised for being too “political.” Generative AI, in the author's experience, also encourages “allsideism” and moral hedging so as not to offend anyone. In calling out a contemporary leader as racist, sexist, xenophobic, or dictatorial, the author’s experience is that one is likely to be asked to take out the example or, if one really feels one must discuss the issue, to use an example of someone who is deceased. The reviewers often emphasize how some readers will be offended, and imply that offense is an outcome to be avoided at all costs.

As Bloom (2025) has pointed out, professors often tend to be cowardly—to believe that they should stay out of worldly matters in which they risk being offensive, being rejected, being canceled, having their funding pulled, being disciplined, or even being fired. The hope of some authorities is that psychologists or others will self-censor, or if they do not, that their colleagues, even those who agree with them, will tell them to be “more scientific”—by which they mean staying away from controversial issues. Indeed, it is often difficult to get funded for any research that might offend the government in power. These fears are not unrealistic. Existing funding may be pulled. And in some societies, the scholars may be imprisoned or worse. This situation has gotten worse over time, not better.

Serious transformational psychology will not be possible if psychologists are afraid to speak out, or if they are told that they can speak out but that then they will not have their work published. A second step, beyond courage, is to be exceptional and assertively speak out. There are brave exceptions who have spoken out. For example, Kellerman (2004) and Lipman-Blumen (2006) have discussed failed leaders, including living ones, as well as the citizens who have failed in their civic duty and supported them. Neither researcher, however, has a home in a psychology department. Sometimes, the matter is as simple as stating that genocide, such as the war in Ukraine today, is wrong, whether the genocidal leaders or the people supporting them are living or dead.

The third step is to avoid falling into the trap of saying that we can never predict with certainty what will happen if people do this or that, so we should never blame people who could not predict the adverse outcomes of their actions. The purpose of Institutional Review Boards is to identify unethical research before it happens. Psychologists are on these boards. Transformational psychologists need to apply the same principles of ethics beyond just psychological research. Torturing people, committing genocide, harming people in the name of ideology or politics—these are morally wrong, and we, as psychologists, must be willing to call out such behavior rather than avert our eyes if we are going to help end it. Psychologists can predict one aspect of the future—if these practices are allowed to continue, that future will not go well.

This article is not a call for psychologists to become even more ideological—whether left-wing or right-wing—than they have been. The field of psychology has had more than enough of that. Rather, it is a call to take positions of universal morality when leaders, societies, or other individuals or groups commit morally transgressive behavior, such as murder, genocide, torture, deprivation of liberty, rape, or wanton cruelty, that violates the principles of human dignity set out in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Practitioners of transformational psychology are unlikely to be a-transactional or anti-transactional. They, like everyone else, need to earn a living, and they may well seek the same tangible rewards that others in the field seek. They need, at times, perhaps often, to be transactional. But they do not stop with the tangible rewards or let their work be dominated by the exchange of rewards. Rather, they go beyond such rewards to seek the common good that eludes so many of us, and that too many of us simply ignore or disparage. They do not seek to enhance their own professional standing by illegitimately lowering that of others, whether acting individually or as part of a group, such as a social-media mob.

The concept of transformational psychology as presented here draws upon the notion of universal moral principles (e.g., Aquinas, 1988; Kant, 1996; Kohlberg, 1981, 1984; Lind, 2008; Sternberg, 2025c; United Nations General Assembly, 1948). We would argue, with Rachels and Rachels (2019), that what differs is how the universal moral principles are manifested, applied, and evaluated in different societies. This is not to say that there are not some moral principles that differ from one sociocultural group to another, but rather, that there are other moral principles that transcend the more local ones. We would also note that however universal some principles may be, those principles sometimes end up being prescriptive rather than descriptive, as is seen in religious and other groups that believe in the sanctity of human life and then avidly violate their own principles. Too often, the moral principles turn out, at best, to apply to people who look like, think like, or feel like them.

Other scholars take a more culturally relative position. For example, Haidt and Joseph (2007) have argued that certain moral principles or, in Haidt and Joseph’s case, foundations, are universal, but which ones apply where varies. Westermarck (1932), Herskovits (1972), Shweder (1991), Prinz (2007), and Benedict (1934) would differ with us and question whether there are such universal moral principles. If there are no universal moral principles, however, any hope for the solution of many world problems may diminish, as people may simply claim to be acting morally as they blithely murder, steal from, or otherwise harm others, supposedly on the authority of their religion, ideology, political system, or whatever. Such authority is manufactured, often cynically, to fit the situation.

One might worry that a terrorist, an evil dictator, or a psychopath might decide that what they are doing is transformational. They indeed might, but they would be wrong, because, in our view, there are universal principles of morality, and these individuals would be blatantly violating them. Anyone can, under the right circumstances, convince themselves of almost anything, and psychologists know how strong myside bias is (Baron, 2023; Stanovich, 2021). But rationalization is not rational thinking—it is, rather, a Freudian defense mechanism against truth (A. Freud, 1937). When one murders others in cold blood, when one violates human rights and dignity, when one discriminates against others on the basis of demographic characteristics, in violation of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Hippocratic Oath, and the principles of religions and historically-important ethical systems, such as Kant’s (see Sternberg, 2025c), any attempts to justify one’s behavior are simply self-serving rationalizations of gross violations of human dignity. The acts are, in a word, immoral, no matter what excuses are offered for them. Terrorists, murderers, psychopaths, narcissists, sadists, and others may have rationalized excuses for their behavior. But the excuses do not pass the tests of universal morality. Rather, they are simply manifestations of toxic behavior rationalized for the benefit of certain individuals or groups at the expense of others—examples of myside bias. We should not dignify them or their pretense of validity with “bothsidesism.” And loud assertions of morality or ostentatious pretensions to morality by supposedly religious or similar observance do not justify immoral acts against others.

Although the emphasis in this article is on universal principles of justice, ethics, and right behavior, there are also principles that can be found at sociocultural and individual levels (e.g., Haidt, 2001; Haidt & Joseph, 2007; Rogoff, 2003; Shweder et al., 1987; Sternberg, 2026b; Turiel, 2002; Vygotsky, 1978). Our reason for emphasizing universal principles as a basis for transformational psychology is that sociocultural principles differ and often come into conflict with each other. In such cases, perhaps the only just resolution may be an appeal to universal principles that transcend the thinking or interests of any single particular sociocultural group.

Summation

Schools of psychology have historically differed in their foundational assumptions about human nature, characteristic language, core theories, preferred methods, and signature applications. The schools of psychology often were developed or advanced by influential thought leaders (Hothersall & Lovett, 2022; Leahey, 2025; Woody & Viney, 2023). Transformational psychology is intended to meet the criteria of a school of psychology: It has a relatively coherent tradition; it assumes meaningful human agency and responsibility; it develops a vocabulary centered on concepts such as the common good, moral intelligence, and transformational wisdom; it interprets research and practice in part by their implications for sustainable collective well-being; and it prioritizes applications that foster constructive, durable change rather than narrow short-term gains.

A central distinction in the paper is between transactional and transformational orientations in psychology. Table 2 summarizes the differences among the various kinds of psychology.

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Table 2.

The Differences Among Various Kinds of Psychology

Kind of Psychology	Definition of the Kind of Psychology	Example of the Kind of Psychology
Transactional	Tit-for-tat. Research, teaching, or practice is oriented toward exchange, whereby one is extrinsically rewarded for one’s work	A professor collects a salary for teaching and research, or a practitioner is paid for therapy, where the main goal is compensation, professional recognition, and advancement
(Fully) transformational	Research, teaching, or practice designed to promote a common good—to make the world a better place by making a positive, meaningful, and potentially enduring difference to the world	A psychologist does research that provides a method for achieving peace between competing nations or a resolution of conflicts between competing organizations, thereby benefiting all parties to the conflicts and those affected by the conflicts
Pre-transformational	Research, teaching, or practice in the earliest stages of becoming fully transformational	A psychology teacher is starting to think about how their teaching could help students to realize the importance of using psychology to make the world a better place
Proto-transformational	Research, teaching, or practice in the middle stages of becoming fully transformational	A psychology teacher has been teaching students how to make the world better and is now seeing the fruits of their labor through their students starting to make positive changes through their endeavors
Post-transformational	Research, teaching, or practice by someone who has been transformational but is now focusing on mentoring the next generation of transformational psychologists	A transformational researcher has retired but continues to mentor younger professionals on how they can make a positive, meaningful, and potentially enduring difference to the world
Para-transformational	Research, teaching, or practice that appears as though it may be transformational but whose long-term effects have not been sufficiently studied and thus that may eventually have no effect or negative effects	A psychologist proposes an interrogation technique to their national intelligence agency but has not sufficiently considered or tested whether the technique is humane and consistent with the preservation of human dignity
Pseudo-transformational	Work promoted as transformational that is actually done only for the benefit of a particular individual or group with only the pretense of transformationality	A psychologist proposes an interrogation technique to their national intelligence agency, knowing full well that it is unethical, inhumane, and inconsistent with human dignity

The principal distinctions are that transactional psychology has as its raison-d’être a tit-for-tat orientation—one gives in exchange for extrinsic rewards, and those rewards lead to further giving in the hope of obtaining further rewards, ad infinitum. Transformational psychology has as its raison-d’être the goal of making the world a better place, regardless of what the extrinsic rewards may be. Pseudo-transformational psychology makes the pretension of being transformational but is actually done for the benefit of the individual or the individual’s identity group. The rest is for show.

Transactional psychology, as used here, refers less to any particular substantive school and more to an incentive-shaped stance toward research and practice: Work becomes calibrated to professional transactions and reinforcement contingencies (e.g., publication, funding, promotion, reimbursement), often favoring low-risk incremental advances and discouraging paradigm-challenging efforts (Kuhn, 1970; Sternberg et al., 2002, 2025a). Transactional work is not inherently flawed; indeed, it has yielded enormous scientific and applied progress. The concern is that an exclusively transactional orientation can become conceptually exhausted and insufficiently responsive to urgent societal problems, particularly when those problems are driven by predictable psychological mechanisms, such as credulity, conformity pressures, motivated reasoning, intergroup hatred, and susceptibility to pseudo-transformational leaders (e.g., Pennycook & Rand, 2019; Roozenbeek & van der Linden, 2019, 2024; Sternberg, 2025b, 2026a).

Transformational psychology is not proposed as a replacement for existing schools of psychology. Rather, it is designed to crosscut and integrate them, leveraging their theoretical and methodological strengths while orienting them toward outcomes that advance sustainable, widely shared well-being. For example, principles from behavioral psychology (e.g., reinforcement, habit formation) can be used to support pro-environmental behavior and reduce harmful consumption; social-psychological work on intergroup conflict and cooperation can inform interventions that reduce polarization and violence; clinical approaches can be extended beyond symptom reduction toward reducing hate and cognitive distortions that fuel social harm (A. T. Beck, 1999; Sherif et al., 1961; Sternberg, 2026a). The defining feature is not the method, population, or subfield, but rather the aim and its execution: to generate verifiable explanatory knowledge and practical tools that help individuals and institutions pursue the common good ethically and effectively. While there is no consensus on what constitutes a common good, transformational psychology can help stakeholders work together not only to achieve a common good but also to figure out what it might be. What matters most is an honest process that encompasses the needs of all affected groups, not just one’s own or one’s preferred groups.

The conclusion also underscores an essential caution: Psychology can be transformational, but it can also be pseudo-transformational—adopting the rhetoric of helping humanity while producing harm through unethical practice, weak evidence, or self-serving agendas. Historical examples illustrate how claims of world betterment can be used to rationalize coercion, deception, or profound violations of human dignity. Transformational psychology, therefore, requires not only aspiration but also ethical discipline: ends do not justify means, and interventions must be grounded in rigorous evidence and respect for persons.

Transformational Psychology as a School of Psychology

It is now time to return to the issue of schools of psychology and what it is that makes transformational psychology understandable as a school.

(1) Core conception of human nature. The core conception of human nature relevant to transformational psychology is that human nature is modifiable, but only with deliberate and sustained effort on the part of leaders and citizens willing to lead it toward transformation. People, on this view, are typically transactional in their everyday lives, following the reward structures of the institutions in which they are embedded and the roles that they play in those institutions. Transactionalism, on this view, is not a school of psychology or of anything else, but rather a life path that people tend to create unless they decide to lead or be led toward loftier, more important goals, such as making the world a better place for everyone. Transformational psychology—psychology devoted to positive transformation of the world—is an umbrella for such leadership or followership.

Implications

Three implications of transformational psychology concern education, measurement, and the school’s relationship with concepts such as self-actualization and altruism.

First, education is central to the school. Transformational psychology implies a form of transformational education that equips learners to evaluate claims, resist manipulation and coercion, and reason dispassionately about the long-term consequences of individual and collective action. Educational practice should cultivate capacities associated with moral intelligence (Clarken, 2009; Lennick & Kiel, 2005; Sternberg, 2025c) and wisdom—abilities to reason with reference to broadly defensible ethical standards and to balance stakeholder interests over the short and long term (Baltes & Staudinger, 1993, 2000; Lerner et al., 2005, 2015; Sternberg, 1998, 2004, 2024). Importantly, wisdom does not automatically follow from intelligence, expertise, or technical ingenuity (Soleimani-Dashtaki et al., 2024; Sternberg, 1998, 2024; Sternberg et al., 2024; Sternberg & Soleimani-Dashtaki, 2024). Many contemporary crises reflect not a deficit of knowledge, but a deficit of good and reasoned judgment about how knowledge should be applied—what Sternberg and other scholars have described as a failure to balance self, others, and larger systems with humility, perspective-taking, and responsibility for the common good (e.g., Grossmann, 2022; Sternberg, 1998, 2024; Westrate & Bluck, 2022). Transformational education would also teach how to recognize pseudo-transformational influence—leaders and movements that promise collective salvation while concentrating power, inflaming hatred, or eroding ethical constraints.

Second, transformational psychology invites deliberate work on measurement. If transformational aims are to be treated as scientific goals rather than as slogans, psychologists will need defensible operationalizations and multimethod assessments to measure transformational thoughts and actions. One useful distinction is between typical performance (how individuals characteristically think and feel, often assessed via self-report and personal report) and maximum performance (what individuals can do under conditions that elicit their best reasoning and skill, often assessed via performance tasks, simulations, case-based judgment, or behavioral indicators). Both are important: Individuals may possess the capacity for wise or ethical judgment but fail to deploy it, or they may perceive themselves as capable when their demonstrated reasoning does not support that belief. Measurement strategies, therefore, should combine self-report with behavioral methods (e.g., scenario-based assessments of stakeholder balancing, simulations of misinformation resistance, third-party evaluations of real-world action, or longitudinal follow-ups). Transformational outcomes also pose a methodological challenge: The downstream effects of actions may be delayed, diffuse, and context-dependent. Accordingly, transformational measurement will often require designs that capture time-lagged consequences, examine unintended effects, and evaluate whether benefits generalize beyond a narrow in-group.

Third, the relationship between transformational psychology and other concepts, such as self-actualization and altruism, needs elucidation. Transformational psychology by no means rejects personal growth; rather, it reframes growth as incomplete when severed from responsibility for and toward others. Classic accounts of self-actualization emphasize the realization of human potential (Maslow, 1943), while transformational psychology aligns most directly with later extensions that treat self-actualization as culminating in transcendence—integrating personal fulfillment with ethical and societal commitment (Kaufman, 2021). Likewise, empirical and theoretical work on altruism and prosocial behavior highlights pathways through which concern for others can be cultivated and expressed, even under challenging situational constraints (Batson et al., 1981, 1988; Darley & Latané, 1968; De Waal, 2008; Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003; Staub & Vollhardt, 2008). From a transformational perspective, the key question is not whether individuals can thrive, but rather, whether thriving is directed toward ends that strengthen collective well-being rather than merely optimizing the self, often at others’ expense.

In sum, transformational psychology is offered as an organizing school of psychology that takes both the promise and the peril of psychological influence seriously. It seeks to orient theory, research, practice, and education toward strengthening moral intelligence and wisdom in service of the common good, while maintaining rigorous ethical and scientific standards. The proposal is not that all psychologists must adopt this orientation, but that the discipline should make room—intellectually, institutionally, and methodologically—for a school explicitly designed to confront the human psychological contributors to global crises and to develop empirically grounded pathways toward solutions.

One might be concerned that a common good is hard to find, given cultural conflicts in interests, values, and customs. We agree: A common good is hard to find, and we do not claim to have a solution to this problem, any more than anyone else who has tried. We believe that the greatest problem in finding a common good is not actually cultural differences, but rather an ugly aspect of human nature whereby people often want the best for themselves and for people whom they perceive to be like themselves, but not for people they perceive as different (Crocker et al., 1987; Sherif, 1954; Taylor & Doria, 1981). The problem is that they then are not seeking a true common good and do not want to seek a common good; they want to seek a good for themselves and those in their perceived identity group or groups. The role of transformational psychologists is to encourage and help them think beyond their own self-interest.

Charles Osgood (1962) was a pioneer in seeking a common good by reducing inter-group tensions, especially, in his case, as it pertained to international conflicts that can lead to war. He called his method G.R.I.T. (Graduated and Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension Reduction). The method had five basic steps: (a) start with a unilateral conciliatory move; (b) ensure that the action is both visible and verifiable; (c) invite an opposing party to reciprocate; (d) continue the process of small, visible, and verifiable moves; (e) maintain deterrence in case G.R.I.T. fails. Osgood’s method has been studied empirically and has been found generally to be effective (see review of studies in Lindskold, 1978). Other psychologists, such as Kelman (1965) and Ross and colleagues (Bland et al., 2006; Maoz et al., 2002), have also worked toward achieving common goods among parties in conflict.