Im neither a psychologist nor a physicist, but I think one can analogize population vs individual behaviour to condensed matter physics versus particle physics. Condensed matter physics finds emergent behaviour in large clumps of stuff that would, in principle, be totally predictable from first principles (the standard model), but which in practice are quite difficult to guess a priori. Different scales lend themselves to different tools, since nonlinear dynamics (chaos) makes it intractable to apply bedrock reductionist formulae to large systems. The higher order behaviour of complex systems is in no way less interesting or true, I would argue, than the seemingly simpler behaviour of very small systems.

In contrast to condensed matter vs the standard theory (QM basically), QM vs GR has fundamental incongruities, since both theories make claims about what happens at the same scale. Only one (or most likely neither) can be correct at the event horizon and center of a black hole.