Mainstream social psychology in its various conceptions tends to concentrate on individual responses, leaving the social side of the continuous interaction between people and collective arrangements unanalysed. However justified this is for some research questions, it is not justified when the interaction itself is in the focus of interest. Large‐scale social events, processes and institutions require analysis for their psychologically relevant attributes. Three major difficulties in conducting such studies are discussed here: (1) there are no codified methods for the analysis of the social side of the interaction; (2) the varying speeds of historical change demand a distinction, which is difficult to make, between relatively more and relatively less enduring features of a social situation; (3) the role of theory in such research differs from that in mainstream social psycholog