Issues And Debates Flashcards
Gender bias
AVOIDING A BETA BIAS: Equal treatment for men and women (a beta bias) has given women greater opportunities but this may be a disadvantage. Hare- Mustin and Marecek (1988) point out that arguing for equality between men and women draws attention away from woman’s special needs and from differences in power between men and women. In a society, where one goopy holds most of the power, seemingly neutral actions end up benefiting the group with the power. Equal parental leave ignores the biological demands of pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding, and the special needs of women, therefore disadvantaging women. This suggests we should avoid beta bias in order to ensure significant differences are taken account of.
Cultural bias
BIAS IN RESEARCH METHODS: can simply be dealt with using samples from different cultural groups. In 1998, Smith and Bond surveyed research in one European tsar book on social psychology. They found 66% of studies were American, 32% European and 2% came from the rest of the world. Sears (1986) reported 82% of research studies used undergraduates as the participants in psychology studies and 51% were psychology students. The researchers calculated that a randomly selected American student was 4000 times more likely to be a participant in a psychology study than a non-westerner. This suggests psychology findings are not only unrepresentative on a global scale, but also within Western culture and there is a pressing need for samples from different cultural groups.
CONSEQUENCES OF CULTURAL BIAS: a real danger is it helps to create or reinforce stereotypes. An infamous example of damage done by cultural bias in psychology was the US army IQ test, used just before WW1. The tests showed that European immigrants fell slightly below white Americans in terms of IQ, and African Americans were at the bottom of the scale with the lowest mental age. The data from these tests had a profound effect on the attitudes held by Americans towards certain groups of people- black people and people from Southeastern Europe. Therefore the consequence was enduring stereotypes concerning certain ethnic groups and their IQ (Gould, 1981).
Free will and determinism
GENETIC VERSUS ENVIRONMENTAL DETERMINISM: a problem with both genetic and environmental determinism is that neither can be the sole determining factor in behaviour. E.g studies that compare identical twins find about 80% similarity on intelligence or about 40% for depression. In other words, if one twin has a high IQ, there is only an 80% chance that the other twin will be the same. Therefore, genes do not entirely determine behaviour. But equally the environment doesn’t entirely determine behaviour. This means that an interactionist rather than a determinist approach better represents reality.
FREE WILL IS AN ILLUSION AND A CULTURALLY-RELATIVE CONCEPT: just being able to decide between different courses of action is not free will, but it may give us the illusion of having free will. This argument was put forward by the behaviourist B.F. skinner. His point was thar a person might ‘choose’ to buy a particular car or see a particular film, but in fact these choices are determined by previous reinforcement expreriences. Furthermore, the idea of self-determination may be a culturally relative concept, appropriate for individualist societies only. Collectivist cultures place greater value on behaviour determined by group needs. This suggests that free will is a product of socialisation and not something ‘real’.
Nature-nurture debate
DIATHESIS-STRESS MODEL OFFERS A WAY TO UNDERSTAND NATURE AND NURTURE: a diathesis is a biological vulnerability, such as being born with certain genes that predispose a person to developing a disorder. However, research has shown that not everyone with those genes does develop the disorder. Expression of the gene or genes depends on experience in the form of a ‘stressor’ which triggers the condition. Thus a person’s nature is only expressed under certain conditions of nurture. This again emphasises the importance of taking an interactionist approach.
NURTURE AFFECTS NATURE: life experiences shape your biology. Maguire et al (2000) study of London taxi drivers, showed that the region of their brains associated with spatial memory was bigger than in controls. The taxi drivers were not born this way; rather their hippocampi had responded to increases use. In Blakemore and Cooper’s (1970) study, newborn kittens were given large collars restricting what they could see and were raised in a circular drum with either only vertical or horizontal stripes. When introduced to the real world at five months old they could no longer see lines of the opposite orientation. Their innate visual statement had been altered through experience.
Holistic and reductionist
BIOLOGICAL REDUCTIONISM: a strength of biological explanations has been the development of drug therapies. Such treatments have led to a considerable reduction in institutionalisation since the 1950s. They are also a more humane approach to the treatment of mental illness insofar as they do not blame the patient which can lead to greater tolerance of the mentally ill. On the other hand, drug therapies are not always successful and reducing mental illness to the biological level ignores the context and function of such behaviour. While drug therapies have a role to play in treating symptoms, psychological explanations take more account of causal factors and have produced many successful therapies.
ENVIRONMENTAL REDUCTIONISM: limitation of behavioural approach is it was developed using experiments with non-human animals. Humans are not scaled-up versions of other animals. Even in non-human animals, reductionist explanations ignore other possible influences such as cognitive and or emotional factors. This means that environmental reductionism ignores other possible influences on human behaviour, such as social context, intentions and emotions.
EXPERIMENTAL REDUCTIONISM: reducing behaviour to a form that can be studied has been productive but ultimately may not tell us much about everyday life. Findings of lotus and Palmer surrounding EWT have not always been confirmed by studies of real-life eyewitnesses, where memories have been found to be highly accurate (e.g Yuille and Cutshall 1986). The operationalisation of variables, such as eyewitness memory, may result in something that is measurable but bears no resemblance to the real thing. Also in real life there are other factors that motivate performance which cannot be recreated in an experiment- therefore findings often do not reflect the real world. This suggests experimental reductionism may have a negative effect on the relevance of psychological research.
THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM- INTERACTIONIST APPROACH: problem of describing the relationship between the mind and body/brain. One solution suggests everything is reducible to the physical world. The problem with this kind of reductionism is it assumes physical basis of behaviour has a caudal link to higher levels, whereas we can only observe certain physical events are associated with mental events. E.g certain electrical activity in the brain (during REM sleep) is associated with subjective reports of dreaming, but we can’t conclude from this that one causes the other. An alternative approach is to analyse different levels of explanation interact. Dualists believe there is a physical brain and a non-physical ‘mind’ which interact with each other. Research has shown that the mind can affect our biology. For example, Martin et al (2001) found depressed patients who received psychotherapy’s experienced the same changes in the level of serotonin and norepinephrine in the brain as those receiving drugs. An interactionist approach may therefore be more appropriate than a reductionist one in explaining the mind-body problem.
Idiographic and nomothetic
IDIOGRAPHIC: focus on the individual: humanistic psychologists and qualitative psychologist felt there was too much emphasis on measurement and that psychologists had lost sight of what it was to be human. Allport, who was the first to use the terms idiographic and nomoethic, argued that a drastic reorientation was needed and that’s precisely what the idiographic approach did. Allport argued tat it is only by knowing the person as an individual that we ca predict what that person will do in any situation. This suggests the focus on individuals can provide us with a more complete understanding.
IDIOGRAPHIC: lack of objective evidence: limitation of the idiographic approach. Positive psychology aims to be more evidence-based. However, other idiographic approaches (case studies or qualitative research) do use an evidence-based approach and also seek to be objective. For example, qualitative approaches use reflective to identify the influence of any biases. Reflectivity refers to the process where researcher reflectors or thinks critically during the research process about the factors that affect the behaviour of both researchers and participants. Thus idiographic approaches do embrace many of the aims of the scientific approach.
IDIOGRAPHIC: may be scientific but inability to produce general predictions about behaviour is limiting: such general predictions can be useful, for example in producing drugs to treat mental illness. It would be far too time consuming to produce personal therapies for unique individuals and therefore we need to make predictions about the most likely therapeutic solutions. Allport argued that the idiographic approach does enable predictions. Once a researcher has built up extremely detailed observations of a few individuals, this can be used to make generalisations and formulate theories. Hall and Lindzey (1970) argue that this stance makes allport’s approach basically nomothetic rather than idiographic. Overall, this suggests nomothetic approaches are more useful than the idiographic approach in developing psychological treatments.
IDIOGRAPHIC APPROACH IS TIME CONSUMING: both approaches are based on large amounts of data, but one is in terms of collecting large amounts of data about one person (idiographic) and one is about collecting in terms of number of people (nomothetic). Collecting large amounts of data from a group of people takes time but, relatively speaking, is quicker because, once you have devised a questionnaire or psychological test, data can be generated and processed quickly. This means that the idiographic approach is less efficient when it comes to data collection.
COMBINED METHODS: Holt (1967) argued that the idiographic/ nomothetic distinction is a false separation. Holt claimed that there is no such thing as a unique individual and what idiographic approaches usually do is generate general principles. In other words, the idiographic approach actually ends up being nomothetic (as Hall and Lindzey concluded regarded Allport’s approach). Millon and Davis (1996) suggested that the research should start with the nomothetic approach and once ‘laws’ have been produced, they can focus on a more idiographic understanding. In fact, the future for drug therapies will probably entail just that- individualised recipes based on a mix of genetic and environmental insights. Finally, uniqueness can be produced using the nomothetic approach. Eysenck argued that each individual is unique in that they have a unique combination of extra version, introversion and neuroticism. Therefore, uniqueness can be explained through nomothetic laws, which suggests both approaches should be used together.
Ethical implications
JUST AVOID SOCIALLY SENSITIVE RESEARCH: one solution to the problem of handling socially sensitive research (e.g homosexuality, race, gender or addiction) is to avoid it altogether. The argument in favour of doing this is that the findings may have negative consequences for the participants, for the section of society they represent or for the whole of society. However, this would probably leave psychologists with nothing to examine but unimportant issues. Sieber and Stanley argue that ignoring sensitive research is not a responsible approach to science and avoiding controversial topics simply because they are controversial is also an avoidance of responsibility. Therefore psychologists have a duty to conduct such research.
ENGAGING WITH THE PUBLIC AND POLICYMAKERS: to ensure that socially sensitive research is used responsibly, researchers should engage with wider society, including the public and policy makers. This research has important applications. In order to reduce the likelihood of misuse of data, psychologists should be energetic in taking responsibility for what happens to their findings. They should be aware of the possibility that the results of their research might lead to abuse and discrimination or as Sieber and Stanley suggest, offer ‘scientific credibility to the prevailing prejudice’. The British psychological society has a press centre which aims to promote evidence—based psychological research to the media. This suggests that individual researchers should be supported in promoting their research into a socially sensitive way, as opposed to the neural position that some scientists wish to take.
