Holism And Reductionism: Evaluate

Question 1

The danger of lower levels of explanation:

Wolpe (1973)

Answer 1

lower levels may overlook meanings of behaviours e.g. Wolpe attempted to treat a women’s fear of insects using SD but it didn’t work and he later found out that her husbands nickname resembled an insect and thus the root issue was her marital problems. Thus lower levels can distract us from more appropriate levels of explanation

Question 2

Biological reductionism:

Answer 2

biological explanations have affected the development of drug therapies. They have difficulties in that their success rate is variable, and they treat the symptoms not the causes. Thus biological explanations ignore the context and function of behaviour whereas psychological explanations take more account of these

Question 3

Environmental Reductionism:

Answer 3

the behavioural approach was enveloped using animals but this may not be appropriate for more complex human behaviour. Humans aren’t scaled up versions of animals because our behaviour is influenced by social context, interactions etc. So reductionist explanations ignore cognitive/emotional factors

Question 4

Experimental reductionism:

Answer 4

Experimental reductionism poses a question regarding how much such findings actually reflect real-life

the operationalisation of variables may result in something that is measurable but bears no resemblance to the real thing and thus studies suffer from low ecological validity