- Social: Social impact theory reduces behaviour down to a mathematical equation. Measuring prejudice attitudes by questionnaires can reduce complexity of behaviour. Sherif reduces prejudice to being caused by conflict – ignores upbringing and biological aspect.
- Cognitive: Memory is reduced to stores – machine reductionism, ie MSM and WMM. Ignores environmental factors. Reconstructive is less reductionist – other components. Baddeley – WMM splits memories into stores, ie slave systems.
- Biological: Argues for EITHER nature or nurture w/out considering other side. Raine could result in people believing aggression is deterministic; people not taking responsibility for actions. Reduces behaviour to individual structures like prefrontal cortex; neglects whole person. Raine ignores environmental factors, and only looks at criminals NGRI.
- Learning: Reduces animal behaviour to simple brain functioning. Stimulus-response connections reduce all behaviour to just singular cause and effect and do not take cognition into account. Human behaviour as a set of learned responses. Bandura is better, looks at environment and behavioural factors.
- Clinical: Reduces mental health to biological processes, family therapy recognises importance of communication – looks at wider social context. Rosenhan reduces schizophrenia to hearing three words, patients reduced to their illness.
- Child: Attachment types ignore upbringing and temperament of child. Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg – one individualistic culture representing whole country, doesn’t take into account biological aspect of attachment.
