Issues and Debates terms

• Gender bias refers to the different treatment or representation of men and women based on their gender
• Alpha bias exaggerates the differences between genders. Prejudices and stereotypes are reinforced
• Beta bias minimises differences between genders, often one gender is ignored or under represented.
• Androcentrism - male centred

  Male behaviour and mental health is the benchmark for all mental health
• Universality refers to characteristics of humans that are applied to everyone.

  Within gender, all research assumed to apply to all genders.
• Culture bias refers to the tendency to ignore cultural differences and interpret all aspects of behaviour through the lens on one's own culture.
• Ethnocentrism is a type of cultural bias that assumes one's own culture is superior to other cultures and this is the correct way to behave, usually Western - behaviour that doesn't conform to this is usually seen as somehow underdeveloped
• Cultural relativism - certain things may only be understood and make sense from within the culture they were discovered in (an emic approach)

  Being able to recognise this is a good way to avoid culture bias
• Emic vs Etic

  An etic approach looks at behaviour from outside a given culture and attempt to describe the behaviour as universal

  An emic approach is researching within certain cultures and suggesting this behaviour is specific and exclusive to it
• Imposed etic is when your own cultural understanding of what is 'normal' is inappropriately applied to other cultures
• Individualistic - focussing on individual growth and achievement

  e.g. UK and US
• Collectivist - focus on communal achievement

  e.g. Japan
• Universality refers to characteristics that are applied to everyone. In culture, it means all research is assumed to apply equally to all cultures.
• 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