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ON SPEAKING TO undergraduates, postgraduates and academics, it is striking how many of us were motivated to choose a path into psychology because of our personal experiences and values. This is no surprise, because psychology offers us ways to understand ourselves and the world around us. It also suggests ideas about how we might change ourselves and the world around us, be this by studying and/or teaching the subject, conducting research, or through our broader everyday interactions with one another. In this short article, we offer some critical thoughts on the relationships between psychological research, teaching, theory and action. We agree that psychology has the potential to have great positive social impact. But to realise its potential, we suggest that we may need to think carefully about the range of psychologies that we practice, and some of the assumptions that are typically made about relationships between theory and action in the discipline.