Need To Know Issues And Debates Flashcards
Gender bias
-differential treatment or representation of men and women based on stereotypes rather than real differences
Androcentrism
- taking male thinking/behaviour as normal
- regarding female thinking/behaviour as deviant, inferiour, abnormal, ‘other’ when different.
Alpha bias
- tendency to exaggerate differences between men and women
- means theories deviate one gender in comparison to another
Beta bias
- occurs when differences between men and women are minimised
- often happens when findings obtained from men are applied to women without additional validation.
Universality
-aim to develop theories that apply to all people which may include real differences
Culture bias
- judging all people in terms of your own cultural assumptions which biases your judgement
Ethnocentrism
- belief in superiority of ones own cultural group
- eg Ainsworths strange situation showed the norms and values of American culture and showed the ideal attachement type as being secure
Cultural relativism
- all cultures are worthy of respect and that in studying another culture we need to try and understand the way a particular culture sees the world
Imposed Etic
- whereby behavior from outside of a particular culture are then described those behavior as universal
Free will
-each individual has power to make choices about their behaviour and aren’t controlled by biological or external forces
Determinism
- behaviour controlled by external or internal factors acting upon individual
Hard determinism
- all behaviour can be predicted
- no free will which means the two incompatible
Soft determinism
-version of determinism that allows for some element of free will
Environmental determinism
- behaviour is under control of features in external environment such as reinforcement and punishment ie social forces.
- eg behaviourist approach sees behaviour as the product of reinforcement and punishment
Biological determinism
- behavior is under control of hormones, brain activity and genetic
- eg mental illness like depression caused by low levels of serotonin
Psychic determinism
-thoughts and feelings are determined by life or death instincts and by repressed conflicts
Causal explanations
- science is heavily deterministic in its search for causal relationships as it seeks to discover whether x causes y or whether IV causes changes in the DV
Environment
- seen as everything outside body which can include people, events and the physical world
Heredity
- process by which resists are passed down genetically from one generation to the next
Interactionist approach
-approach argues several levels of explanation are necessary to explain a particular behaviour ranging from lower ( biological) to higher levels (social and cultural)
Nature /nurture debate
- centres on relative contributions of genetic inheritance and environmental factors to human development and behaviour
Biological reductionism
- refers to way that biological psychologists try to reduce behaviour to physical level and explain it in terms of
- neurons
- neurotransmitters
- hormones
- brain structure
Environmental reductionism
- aka stimulus response reductionism
- Behaviourists assume all behaviour can be reduced to simple building blocks of stimulus response associations and complex behaviours are a series of S-R chains
Experimental reductionism
- where complex behaviour is reduced to a single variable for the purpose of testing
Holism
-idea that human behaviour should be viewed as a whole integrated experience and not as separate parts
Levels of explanations
- reductionist approach suggests behaviour can be explained at different levels
- eg social and cultural, psychological or biological
Parsimony
-idea that complex phenomena should be explained in the simplest terms possible
Reductionism
-belief that human behaviour can be explained by breaking it down into simpler component parts
Idiographic approach
- psychologists who take an idiographic approach focus on individual
- emphasise unique personal experience of human nature
Nomothetic approach
- psychologists who take a nomothetic approach are concerned with establishing general laws based on study of large groups of people
- with the use of statistical (quantitative) techniques to analyse data
Ethical implications
- ethical implications consider impact or consequences that psychological research has on rights of other people in a wider context
- not just participants taking part in research
Social sensitivity
- Sieber and Stanley used term social sensitivity to describe studies
- where there are potential social consequences for participants or group of people represented by research
