Issue and Debates

Question 1

What is Universality?

Answer 1

Universality is the idea that there are a range of psychological characteristics of human beings that can be applied to all of us despite differences in experiences and upbringing.

Question 2

What is bias?

Answer 2

The term bias is used to suggest that a person’s views are distorted in some way, and in psychology there is evidence that gender is presented in a biased way.

Question 3

What is gender bias?

Answer 3

Gender bias leads to differential treatment of males and females, based on stereotypes and not real differences.

Question 4

What is androcentrism?

Answer 4

Taking male thinking/behavior as normal, regarding female thinking/behavior as deviant, inferior, abnormal, ‘other’ when it is different. In the past most psychologists were male, and the theories they produced tended to represent a male view of the world.

Question 5

What is alpha bias?

Answer 5

Alpha bias refers to theories which exaggerate the differences between males and females.

Question 6

The evolutionary approach in psychology has been criticised for its alpha bias.

Answer 6

This is because this approach suggests that evolutionary processes in the development of the human species explain why men tend to be dominant, why women have a more parental investment in their offspring, However, society has changed considerably over recent years, and it is argued that the evolutionary perspective shouldn’t be used to justify gender differences.

Question 7

Freud

Answer 7

Freud believed that gender divergence begins at the onset of the phallic stage, where the girl realises that she has no penis, and starts to feel inferior to boys (penis envy). Penis envy becomes a major driving force in the girl’s mental life, and needs to be successfully sublimated into a desire for a husband and children if it is not to become pathological.

Question 8

What is beta bias?

Answer 8

Beta bias theories have traditionally ignored or minimised sex differences. These theories often assume that the findings from males can apply equally to females.

Question 9

What is the evidence of beta bias in psychological research?

Answer 9

For example, Rosenthal (1966) reported that male experimenters were more pleasant, friendly, honest, and encouraging with female than with male participants. This led Rosenthal to conclude: “Male and female subjects may, psychologically, simply not be in the same experiment at all.”

Question 10

What are the positive consequences of gender bias?

Answer 10

Has led to some theorists (Gilligan) to assert the worth and valuation ‘feminine qualities’.
Has led to healthy criticism of cultural values that praise certain ‘male’ qualities such as aggression and individualism as desirable, adaptive and universal.

Question 11

What are the positives of beta bias?

Answer 11

Makes people see men and women as the same, which has led to equal treatment in legal terms and equal access to, for example, education and employment.

Question 12

What are the negative consequences of beta bias?

Answer 12

Draws attention away from the differences in power between men and women
Is considered as an egalitarian approach but it results in major misrepresentations of both genders.

Question 13

What is culture bias?

Answer 13

Culture bias occurs when all human behaviour is interpreted from only one cultural viewpoint.

Question 14

culture bias in research

Answer 14

Western psychologists routinely generalise their findings from societies in small sections of the world like this onto people as a whole, but findings of psychological research conducted in one culture may not apply directly to another.

Question 15

Give evidence on cultural bias in psychological research

Answer 15

Culture bias- Smith and Bond (1988) found that 66% of participants in European textbooks on social psychology were American, 32% European, and only 2% from the rest of the world.

Question 16

What is Ethnocentrism

Answer 16

Ethnocentrism is when a researcher takes their own culture as the norm and interprets deviations from this as ‘abnormal’. Ethnocentrism is an often inadvertent lack of awareness that other ways of seeing things can be as valid as one’s own.

Question 17

Give an example of ethnocentrism

Answer 17

Fernando claims that African-Caribbeans in Britain are sometimes diagnosed as ‘mentally ill’ on the basis of behaviour which is perfectly normal in their subculture, and this is due to the ignorance of African-Caribbean subculture on the part of white psychiatrists.

Question 18

Give an example of ethnocentric research

Answer 18

Fernando claims that African-Caribbeans in Britain are sometimes diagnosed as ‘mentally ill’ on the basis of behaviour which is perfectly normal in their subculture, and this is due to the ignorance of African-Caribbean subculture on the part of white psychiatrists.

Question 19

What is cultural relativism?

Answer 19

Cultural relativism suggests that behaviours and concepts can only be understood correctly from the perspective of their cultural context. Therefore, any study which draws its sample from only one cultural context (like American college students) and then generalises its findings to all people everywhere, is suspect.

Question 20

What is free will?

Answer 20

Free Will suggests that we all have a choice and can control and choose our own behavior.

Question 21

Evaluations of free will

Answer 21

It emphasises the importance of the individual and studying individual differences.
It fits society’s view of personal responsibility e.g. if you break the law you should be punished.
The idea of self-efficacy is useful in therapies as it makes them more effective.
Free will is subjective and some argue it doesn’t exist.

Question 22

What is environmental determinism?

Answer 22

Some approaches in psychology see the source of this determinism as being outside the individual, a position known as environmental determinism.

Question 23

What is biological determinism?

Answer 23

Behaviour is from inside i.e., in the form of unconscious motivation or genetic determinism

Question 24

Free will is an illusion

Answer 24

Skinner (1971) argued that freedom is an illusion. We may think we have free will but the probability of any behavior occurring is determined by past experiences. Skinner claimed that free will was an illusion – we think we are free, but this is because we are not aware of how our behavior is determined by reinforcement.

Question 25

What is biological determinism?

Answer 25

Our biological systems, such as the nervous system, govern our behavior. For example, a high IQ may be related to the IGF2R gene

Question 26

What is psychic determinism?

Answer 26

Freud believed childhood experiences and unconscious motivations governed behavior. Freud thought that free will was an illusion, because he felt that the causes of our behavior is unconscious and still predictable.

Question 27

What is hard determinism?

Answer 27

Hard Determinism sees free will as an illusion and believes that every event and action has a cause.

Question 28

What is soft determinism?

Answer 28

Soft Determinism represents a middle ground, people do have a choice, but that choice is constrained by external factors e.g. Being poor doesn’t make you steal, but it may make you more likely to take that route through desperation.

Question 29

Strengths of determinism

Answer 29

Determinism is scientific and allows cause and effect relationships to be established.
It gives plausible explanations for behavior backed up by evidence.

Question 30

Weaknesses of determinism

Answer 30

Does not account for individual differences. By creating general laws of behavior, deterministic psychology underestimates the uniqueness of human beings and their freedom to choose their own destiny.

Hard determinism suggests criminals cannot be held accountable for their actions. Deterministic explanations for behavior reduce individual responsibility. A person arrested for a violent attack for example might plead that they were not responsible for their behavior – it was due to their upbringing, a bang on the head they received earlier in life, recent relationship stresses, or a psychiatric problem. In other words, their behavior was determined.

Question 31

What is the nature-nurture debate?

Answer 31

the relative importance of heredity and environment in determining behaviour; the interactionist approach

Question 32

What is nature?

Answer 32

Nature is the view that all our behavior is determined by our biology, our genes. This is not the same as the characteristics you are born with, because these may have been determined by your prenatal environment.

Question 33

What is nurture?

Answer 33

Nurture is the opposite view that all behavior is learnt and influenced by external factors such as the environment etc.

Question 34

Behaviourist Approach

Answer 34

SLT proposes that much of what we learn is through observation and vicarious reinforcement. E.g., Bandura demonstrated this in his Bobo doll experiments. He found that children who watched an adult role model being rewarded for aggression towards an inflatable doll, tended to imitate that behavior when later on their own with a Bobo doll.
This supports the idea that personality is determined by nurture rather than nature. This provides us with a model of how to behave. However, such behavior becomes part of an individual’s behavioral repertoire through direct reinforcement – when a behavior is imitated, it receives direct reinforcement (or not).

Question 35

Evaluations

Answer 35

Empirical evidence shows that behavior is learnt and can be modified through conditioning.
Behaviorist accounts are all in terms of learning, but even learning itself has a genetic basis. For example, research has found that mutant flies missing a crucial gene cannot be conditioned (Quinn et al., 1979).
Instead of defending extreme nature or nurture views, most psychological researchers are now interested in investigating the ways in which nature and nurture interact. It is limiting to describe behavior solely in terms of either nature or nurture, and attempts to do this underestimate the complexity of human behavior.
For example, in psychopathology, this means that both a genetic predisposition and an appropriate environmental trigger are required for a mental disorder to develop. Therefore, it makes more sense to say that the difference between two people’s behavior is mostly due to hereditary factors or mostly due to environmental factors.
The Diathesis-stress model of Schizophrenia suggests that although people may inherit a predisposition to Schizophrenia, some sort of environmental stressor is required in order to develop the disease. This explains why Schizophrenia happens in the late teens or early adulthood, times of considerable upheaval and stress in people’s lives e.g. leaving home, starting work, forging new relationships etc.

Question 36

Holism meaning

Answer 36

Holism is often referred to as Gestalt psychology. It argues that behavior cannot be understood in terms of the components that make them up. This is commonly described as ‘the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.’

Question 37

Holism evaluations

Answer 37

Looks at everything that may impact on behavior.
Does not ignore the complexity of behavior.
Integrates different components of behavior in order to understand the person as a whole.
Can be higher in ecological validity.

Question 38

What is reductionism?

Answer 38

Reductionism is the belief that human behavior can be explained by breaking it down into smaller component parts. Reductionists say that the best way to understand why we behave as we do is to look closely at the very simplest parts that make up our systems, and use the simplest explanations to understand how they work.

Question 39

Reductionism evaluations

Answer 39

A reductionist approach to studying mental disorders has led to the development of effective chemical treatments
The disadvantage is that it can be over simplistic. Humans and their environments are so complex that the reductionist explanation falls short of giving the whole explanation of the behavior. Thus, it lacks ecological validity

Question 40

What is nomothetic?

Answer 40

The Nomothetic approach looks at how our behaviors are similar to each other as human beings. The term “nomothetic” comes from the Greek word “nomos” meaning “law”.

Question 41

What is nomothetic?

Answer 41

The Nomothetic approach looks at how our behaviors are similar to each other as human beings. The term “nomothetic” comes from the Greek word “nomos” meaning “law”.

Question 42

Evaluations of Nomotheitc

Answer 42

e nomothetic approach is seen as far more scientific than the idiographic approach, as it takes an evidence based, objective approach to formulate causal laws.
This enables us to make predictions about how people are likely to react in certain circumstances, which can be very useful e.g. Zimbardo’s findings about how prisoners and guards react in a prison environment.
Predictions can be made about groups but these may not apply to individuals.
Approach has been accused of losing sight of the ‘whole person’.

Question 43

What is idiographic approach?

Answer 43

The Idiographic or individual differences approach looks at how our behaviors are different to each other. The term “idiographic” comes from the Greek word “idios” meaning “own” or “private”. Psychologists interested in this aspect of experience want to discover what makes each of us unique. Tend to use qualitative methods

Question 44

What is the evaluation of idiographic approach?

Answer 44

A major strength of the idiographic approach is its focus on the individual. Gordon Allport argues that it is only by knowing the person as a person that we can predict what the person will do in any given situation.
The idiographic approach is very time consuming. It takes a lot of time and money to study individuals in depth. If a researcher is using the nomothetic approach once a questionnaire, psychometric test or experiment has been designed data can be collected relatively quickly.