Holism vs Reductionism Flashcards
Define ‘reductionism’.
Behaviour can be explained by breaking it down to its most simple components.
Outline the levels of explanation.
(e.g. in relation to OCD)
1. Social/cultural level -“deviation from social norms”
2. Psychological level- anxious
3.Physical level- repetitive actions (compulsions).
4. Environmental/learning level- reduced anxiety with replicated action.
5. Biological level- serotonin, genes, basalganglien/OFC
Becomes more reductionist at each level.
Define biological reductionism.
Try to reduce behaviour to a physical level and explain it in terms of neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones, brain structure etc.
Define environmental reductionism.
Also known as stimulus-response reductionism.
All behaviour can be reduced to the simple building blocks of S-R associations.
Define ‘holism’
Aims to consider all contributions to behaviour.
Give an advantage of reductionist explanations as a method of research.
It allows researchers to study the different factors that influence behaviour in a controlled manner, so reduces extraneous variables, and while establishing cause and effect.
You wouldn’t be able to establish cause and effect if you attempted to study all the factors at once, it would be too complex to interpret the findings.
Being reductionist allows us to establish cause and effect.
However, the results of highly controlled lab experiments have very low ecological validity.
Give an advantage of biological reductionism.
It has real life applications as it has led to the development of biological therapies such as drugs.
Without being reductionist we wouldn’t have developed these treatments such as SSRIs for treating OCD.
Give a disadvantage of reductionism being too simplistic.
Biological reductionism can lead to errors of understanding because it ignores the complexity of human behaviour.
It ignores other factors that could be involved in influencing human behaviour.
Give a disadvantage of the methodology in environmental reductionism.
Most of the research uses non-human animals as subjects. For example Pavlov and Skinner used dogs and rats.
We can’t generalise these findings to humans because humans are much more complex and factors like cognition and emotion are hard to measure.
Even when humans are used in experiments, the samples are small.
Give a disadvantage of the holistic explanation for being unscientific.
Holistic explanations do not establish cause and effect, this means they are viewed as unscientific.
