Unlike traditional applied psychology, community psychology uses a multilevel perspective, is sensitive to social context and diversity, and focuses on people's competencies rather than deficiencies. Community psychologists act as collaborators rather than experts and prefer participatory, action-oriented research methods. Most important for critical psychology, community psychology seeks to eliminate disempowering social conditions. All these features might lead one to believe that critical and community psychology are one and the same. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Community psychology does target systemic sources of suffering.
But as Prilleltensky and Nelson point out, it does so in an ameliorative rather than a transformative way. Critical psychology, on the other hand, insists that we cannot eliminate oppression without transforming oppressive institutions and altering the basic premises of unjust systems. For community psychology to benefit from critical psychology's insights, Prilleltensky and Nelson emphasize, it must move social justice from the background of the discipline's concerns to the foreground. In theory, cross-cultural psychology has the potential to challenge mainstream psychology's assumptions and institutions. Cross-cultural psychologists understand, after all, that culture plays a significant role in human behavior.