Doing so requires working not only with children but also with adults, since it is adults who have to provide affection, nurturance and guidance. Intervention can center on creating caring schools, with communities that include every child and promote positive peer relations and constructive bystandership. Such intervention would help children who are badly treated and disconnected from people at home, and protect children in school. It may even stop such horrors as school shootings. Schools can also call on parents as allies, provide training, and help parents create a supportive community that fosters positive socialization.
Intervention aims to create a better world.
But it is also a means of essential new learning. Only by combining the influences explored, usually individually, in controlled research, can we learn whether the whole is what we expect from a combination of the parts, whether the combination of influences usually required to create real change in the world actually does so. I have studied the origins of genocide and other group violence for a long time. Psychologists, who with some exceptions have just begun paying attention to this realm, have a great deal to do. Their research has to extend beyond the laboratory.