5.5. Reductionism vs Holism Flashcards
Reductionism
- Breaking a complex phenomenon down into more simple components
- Desirable as complex phenomena are best understood more simply
- Led to major discoveries
What is reductionism also known as?
Parsimony
Holism
Simple components don’t express that essence of behaviours- sum of parts doesn’t equal the whole
What is holism also referred to as?
Gestalt psychology
What is reductionism based on?
Principle of parsimony- all phenomena should be explained using the simplest principles
Suggests explanations begin at highest level
Highest level
Cultural and social explanations of how our social groups affect our behaviour
Medium level
Psychological explanations of behaviour
Lower levels
Biological explanation of how hormones affect our behaviour
Biological reductionism
- Reduce behaviour to neurons, hormones and neurotransmitters
- Sz explained by excessive dopamine
Environmental reductionism
- Behaviour can be explained in terms of stimulus response links, a relationship between behaviour and events in the environment
- E.g. in attachment, mother provides food, removes hunger, gives pleasure
Experimental reductionism
- Reducing complex behaviour to isolated variables is useful for conducting research
- Behaviours are reduced to operationalised variables that can be manipulated and measured to determine casual relationships
What does holism suggest?
We cannot predict how the whole system will behave just from knowledge of individual components
What is Gestalt psychology?
Focus on perception arguing that explanations for what we see only make sense through consideration of the whole
Humanistic psychology
- Individuals react as an organised whole, rather than a set of stimulus response links
- What matters most is a person’s sense of unified identity; therefore a lack of wholeness leads to a mental disorder
Cognitive psychology
- Memory is a complex system, the idea is that each unit within the overall network is linked to many other units
- Develop through experiences which will weaken or strengthen
- Holistic acts differently from individual parts
Discussion: danger of lower levels of explanation
- If lower levels are taken in isolation then the meaning of behaviour can be overlooked - leads to errors in understanding
- Lower levels distract us from a more appropriate level of explanation e.g. to only focus on the genetic explanation for sz instead of taking in the environment as well
Discussion: biological reductionism
- Drugs have been developed to treat the therapies, these have decreased institutionalisation + are more humane as the\y don’t blame the person, meaning mental illness isn’t a bad thing
- Led to development of antipsychotics
Discussion: Environmental reductionism
- May be appropriate to explain behaviour in simple components but such explanations may not be appropriate for more complex human behaviour.
- Humans are not the same as animals, we are influenced by social context and interactions
- Even the animals research is reductionist as it ignores other possible influences such as cognitive processes.
Discussion: experimental reductionism
- A lot of research has been developed from this area
- Is reliability of research applicable to everyday life?
- E.g. studies like Loftus and Palmer have not been backed up by real life studies
- There are other factors in life that cannot be recreated in a lab experiment - therefore findings cannot reflect the real world
Discussion: the mind body problem
- Problem of explaining the relationships between the mind and the brain
- Solution 1: everything is reducible to the physical world, however we can only observe that certain physical events are associated with mental events -> Psychologists jump to conclusions
- Solution 2: Analyse how the different levels of explanation interact -> research has show the mind can affect our body
- Martin found that depressed patients who received psychotherapy experienced the same changes in levels of serotonin and norepinephrine in the brain as those experiencing those receiving drug therapy
- Kandel: such physiological change should not be surprising because we know that learning creates new neural connections
