Holism vs Reductionism

Question 1

Outline the holism vs reductionism debate (6 marks)

Answer 1

Holism argues that psychology should focus on the full person not explain aspects through a single or limited cause. Humanism argues that people’s behaviour and thoughts can be due to conditions of worth being placed on them and these may be influenced by social or cultural expectations. However reductionism argues that complex human behaviour is broken down into simple basic units. Biological reductionism explains that all behaviour is due to physical factors such as genes or brain structure. This has been used to create drug treatments due to affecting neurotransmitter levels such as dopamine in schizophrenia. Environmental reductionism explains behaviour through stimulus response and associations. It focuses on learning through association such as phobias and ignores factors such as biology and thoughts in explaining behaviour.

Question 2

Outline the levels of explanations in psychology (4)

Answer 2

There are different ways of studying the same event or characteristic where explanations can focus on a low level such as biology to middle levels of psychological explanation for example, environment through to higher explanations such as holism, taking account of social and cultural factors. The debate considers whether it is appropriate to look at one level or if more than one level. OCD could be explained by a single causes such as Neurochemistry such as serotonin, psychological such as obsessive thoughts or social such as attitudes to repetitive hand washing or a more holistic approach which considers all of these in OCD.

Question 3

Discuss holism vs reductionism (3 X AO3)

Answer 3

Holism is praised for explaining aspects of social behaviour which only arise in group settings and cannot be understood at the level of the individual group member. For example, the effects of conformity on social roles and the deindividuation of the prisoners and guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment could not be understood by studying people at an individual level because it was an interaction between people and it was the behaviour of the group that was important. Therefore, in cases such as these, it is important to take a holistic view in order to explain human behaviour.

 One criticism of the holistic approach is that researches often do not use scientific methods to investigate human behaviour, unlike the research from the reductionist explanation. This is because, as the explanations become more complex and more holistic, they become more vague so psychologists are unable to test them scientifically unlike reductionist explanations such as the biological approach, which conduct objective and empirical methods to establish cause and effect. Therefore a reductionist approach to understanding human behaviour, may be favoured due to the increase in internal validity when compared to holistic approaches.

A strength of using a reductionist approaches to explain human behaviour is that it is more likely to lead to practical applications compared to a holistic approach. This is because studying basic units of behaviour e.g. which chemicals are involved in certain behavioural disorders can lead to effective treatment for that disorder. For example, dopamine is a key neurotransmitter in the development of schizophrenia which has lead to the production of antipsychotics which regulate and individual’s dopamine levels and have been effective at reducing the symptoms of schizophrenia. Therefore, using a reductionist explanation to study human behaviour is an important part of applied psychology as it helps to treat people in the real world.