Issues and Debates

• Ethical implications refer to the impact of psychological research on others and the way groups are presented and perceived. There is little control after it's been published.
• Social sensitivity - defined by Seiber and Stanley as 'studies in which there are potential ethical consequences or implication' that directly involve the participants or group implicated in the research
• Free will - we have an active role and choice in how we behave

  approach - Humanism
• Determinism - free will is an illusion, we have no control over our behaviour, it's predictable
• Hard determinism states that free will is not possible, our behaviour is always caused by forces beyond our control

  approaches - Biological, Environmental, Psychic
• Biological determinism - our behaviour is caused by internal biological processes like hormones, brain structure and genes
• Environmental determinism - our behaviour is caused by previous experiences in the environment like conditioning, even if we think we are acting independently, we are not
• Psychic determinism - all behaviour is determined by unconscious drives and conflicts that we cannot control, according to Freud
• Soft determinism - all human behaviour has causes but it can be influenced by conscious choices

  approaches - Cognitive and SLT
• Scientific research is important in identifying causal explanations, these are deterministic. Explanations that assume free will do not emphasis causation - if behaviour is a choice it cannot be predicted or manipulated.
• Nature-Nurture debate refers to the argument of the causes of behaviour coming from within/being innate vs causes coming from the environment including culture and conditioning
• Heredity is the passing on of traits from parents to their offspring
• The interactionist approach combines the arguments of nature and nurture to explain behaviours
• Environmental reductionism is the attempt to explain all behaviour in terms of simple-stimulus response links learned through experience like classical conditioning (behviour learnt through association)
• Biological reductionism is the attempt to explain all behaviour from simple biological factors like brain structures, hormons, genes or brain chemistry
• Levels of explanation seek to establish a hierarchy as to whether psychology is a science. Different levels can be used to explain the same phenomena like OCD - can be seen as purely biological OR related to a combination of things like psychological problems and biological factors. The more explanations there are, the more holistic the explanation is
• Holism claims that it only makes sense to study a whole system not just parts of it, we can only understand human experience and behaviour by studying the whole system
• Reductionism is the belief that human behaviour is best understood by breaking it down into smaller components, studying behaviour in it's most basic form can be used to explain the entire cause of that behaviour

  Based on the concept of parsimony - the simplest explanation is the best

  Ignoring other factors is an effect of reductionism NOT reductionism itself
• Machine reductionism is viewing the mind like a computer