- Holism
- People/behaviour should be studied as a whole system
- Gestalt psychologists: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts
- Breaking up behaviour/experience is inappropriate as they can only be understood by analysing the person/behaviour as a whole
- View shared by humanistic psychology
- g. effective therapy is bringing together all aspects of the whole person
- Cognitive approach
- Memory is a complex system understood through connected networks
- Whole network behaves differently to the individual parts
- Reductionism
- Breaking down behaviour into constituent parts
- Based on scientific principle of parsimony
- All phenomena should be explained using the most basic/lowest level/simplest principles
- g. behaviour of individual cells
- Levels of explanations
- There are different ways of viewing the same phenomena in psychology
- Some more reductionist than others
- g. OCD may be explained in different ways
- Socio-cultural: behaviour most would regard as odd
- Psychological: experience of having obsessive thoughts
- Physical: sequence of movements involved in washing hands
- Physiological: hypersensitivity of the basal ganglia
- Neurochemical: underproduction of serotonin
- Best explanation is debatable
- Each level more reductionist than the one before
- Psychology can be placed on a hierarchy of reductionism/science
- More precise at the bottom
- More general at the top
- Researchers who favour reductionism see psychology being replaced by explanations derived from sciences lower down in the hierarchy
- Biological reductionism
- Physiological/neurochemical level
- All behaviour is to some level biological
- Also: evolutionary/genetic influence
- Successfully applied to explanation/treatment of mental illnesses
- g. effects of psychoactive drugs on the brain have contributed to our understanding of neural processes/how to explain OCD/depression/schizophrenia
- Environmental reductionism
- Basis of behaviourist approach
- Study observable behaviour
- Break complex learning up into stimulus-response links
- Key analysis takes place at physical level
- Not concerned with cognitive processes (psychological level’
- Mind = black box
- Irrelevant to our understanding of behaviour
- Holism can explain key aspects of social behaviour
- Some social behaviours only emerge within a group context
- Cannot be understood at the level of individual members
- g. Stanford prison experiment
- De-individualisation of prisoners/guards could not be understood by studying the participants as individuals
- Interactions between the people matters
- Holistic explanations are needed for a more complete understanding of behaviour
- Holism is impractical
- Explanations tend not to lend themselves to rigorous scientific testing
- Become vague/speculative as they become more complex
- g. if we accept there are many factors contributing to depression it is difficult to establish which is most influential
- Which to use as a basis for therapy?
- Suggests that reductionist approaches may be better when finding solutions for real-world problems
- Reductionism: scientific credibility
- Approach often forms basis of scientific research
- Target behaviours reduced to constituent parts to produce operationalised variables
- Makes it possible to conduct experiments/record observations in meaningful/reliable ways
- Gives psychology greater credibility
- Equal terms with natural sciences
