Holism and Reductionism Flashcards
Reductionism
Reductionism involves the attempt to break complex phenomena down into simpler component parts. This is desirable because breaking complex phenomena down allows better understanding of how these phenomena operate in terms of cause-effect relationships.
All scientific explanations of phenomena are reductionist..
Psychological explanations of behaviour can be thought of as operating on different levels of reductionism, what are these levels?
Highest Level
Middle Level
Lowest Level
What psychological explanation of behaviour is on the higher level of reductionism?
Cultural and social explanations of behaviour.
E.g. how gender is shaped by learning and cultural expectations.
What psychological explanation of behaviour is on the middle level of reductionism?
Psychological explanations of behaviour.
E.g. internal mental processes such as our thoughts and feelings about our gender.
What is the psychological explanation of behaviour that is on the lowest level of reductionism?
Biological explanations of behaviour.
E.g. how genes and hormones affect male and female behaviour.
What is biological reductionism?
Biological psychologists focus on the role of genes, neurology, hormones and neurotransmitters on behaviour.
For example, biological explanations of schizophrenia focus on the idea that inherited genes can cause changes in the brain and or levels of neurotransmitter dopamine to cause schizophrenic symptoms.
What is environmental stimulus-response reductionism?
Behaviourist explanations view all behaviour as arising from previously learnt stimulus-response associations.
For example, a phobic learnt their phobia through assorting their phobic object with fear.
This phobia is further maintained through negative reinforcement, e.g. the phobic is rewarded with positive sensations of relaxation by avoiding their phobic object this is called operant conditioning.
What is Holism?
Some psychologists argue, however, that human behaviour is best understood from studying human behaviour and experience as a meaningful whole, and that reductionist explanations of behaviour. ignore the richness, meaningfulness and complexity of human life.
For example, a holistic approach to schizophrenia would focus on what meaning the individual attaches to their condition rather than sampling viewing it as the result of faulty genes and biochemical imbalance.
Which approach is holism?
Humanistic psychology
Why is humanistic psychology holism?
Humanistic psychology argues that people are best and most meaningfully understood as a whole person rather than as a sum of their parts.
For example, humanistic psychologists such as Maslow argued that biological and behavioural explanations fail to understand emotional aspects of our lives such as our desire to self-actualise.
What is a problem with reductionism?
Many aspects of human life cannot be accounted for through reductionist explanations for example the experience of love and even if reductionist explanations are offered they reduce a complex phenomenon down to an overly simplistic level whose essence becomes meaningless.
What are the strengths with a reductionist approach?
Reductionist approaches follow scientific methods aiming at terming cause-effect relationships between variables using tightly controlled experiments. a huge amount of research using such methods has produced a great deal of knowledge and many practical applications.
For example, understanding the relationship between dopamine and schizophrenia has enabled drugs to be developed which severely reduce the symptoms of schizophrenia and reduce schizophrenic’s distress.
Why has biological reductionism applied to mental disorders and drug therapies been criticised?
It has been criticised for over emphasising the biological causes of disorders and failing to account of social-psychological-environmental causes.
For example, viewing depression as simply resulting from low levels of serotonin and treatable with SSRIs fails to take account of the fact that depressed people feel they are depressed for particular reasons, and there may be quite logical reasons why a person is depressed.
What is a problem with biological and behavioural reductionism?
They both often argue that we can apply findings from research on animals to humans. Critics argue that humans re not just complex animals, rather there are fundamentally different due to their complex though processes, decision-making abilities and sense of self-awareness in the world. Therefore, reductionist explanations ignore the role of cognitions and emotions on behaviour and tend to treat humans as if they are predictable biological or behavioural robots.
