Holism And Reductionism Flashcards
What is the holism-reductionism debate?
Question of whether holism or reductionism is better for understanding human behavior
- holistic approach about studying the ‘whole’
- as you break down the holistic approach it isn’t holistic anymore
- No continuum between holism and reductionism
- Within the reductionist approach: a continuum - levels of explanations
What is the Holism side of the debate?
- Looks at the system as a whole
- Sees attempts to subdivide behavior as inappropriate
- ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’
- focuses on the individuals experience
- cannot be reduced
- humanistic psychologists use qualitative methods to investigate the self
- themes analyzed rather than breaking the concept into component behaviours
What’s an example of levels of explanation?
OCD
- Socio-cultural level: OCD interrupts social relationships
- Psychological level: person’s experience of anxiety
- Physical level: movements eg: washing hands
What’s the reductionism side of the debate?
- analyses behavior by breaking it down into constituent parts
- based on scientific principle ‘parsimony’
- means all phenomena should be explained using the simplest principle
What are levels of explanation in psych?
Different ways to explain behavior
- some behavior more reductionist than others
What’s environmental reductionism?
Behavior approach based on this
- All behavior learned and acquired through interaction with the environment
- Behaviorists explain behavior in terms of conditioning which is focused on stimulus-response links
- Reduced behavior to basic elements
What’s an example of environmental reductionism?
The learning theory of attachment reduced the idea of love (between baby and feeder) to a learned association between the feeder (NS) and food (US) resulting in pleasure (CR)
What is biological reductionism?
- Includes neurochemical and physiological levels
- Includes evolutionary and genetic influence
- based on the idea that we’re biological organisms
- All behavior at some level biological
- Argument works backwards low serotonin may cause OCD
- Reduced OCD to the level neurotransmitter activity
What’s limitations of the holistic approach?
- Lacks practical value
- Holistic accounts of human behavior tend to become hard to use as they become more complex
- If we don’t accept that there are different factors to depression, its hard to see which one is most influential
- Hard to know which one to prioritized as the basis or therapy
What’s one limitation of reductionist approach?
Accused of over simplifying complex phenomena
- leads to reduced validity
- explanations that operate at the level of the gene or neurotransmitters don’t include an analysis of the social context within which behavior occurs
- Suggests reductionist explanations can only be part of the explanation
What’s an example of over simplification in the reductionist approach?
The physiological processes involved in pointing a finger will be the same regardless of context
- analyzing this will not tell us why the finger is pointed
What’s another limitation of reductionist approach?
Some behaviors can only be understood at a higher level
- aspects of a social behavior that only happen within a group context
- cannot be understood in terms of the individual group members
- for some behavior, higher level explanations are required
What’s an example of low level explanations as a limitation of reductionist approach?
The Stanford prison experiment couldn’t have been understood by observing individual participants
- it was the interaction between people and the group behavior that was important
- no ‘conformity gene’ so social processes can be explained at the level that they occur
What are strengths of reductionist approach?
Often form the basis of a scientific approach
- to conduct well controlled research, must operationalize the variables that need to be studied
- makes it possible to conduct experiments or record observations in a way that is objective and reliable
- puts it on equal terms with the natural sciences
- approach gives psychology credibility
What’s an example of the strength of the reductionist approach?
Attachment research operationalize component behaviors such as separation anxiety
