Issues and Debates

• Levels of explanation in psychology

  • Social-cultural context
  • Psychological level
  • Physiological level
  • Neurochemical level
• Ethnocentrism


  Evaluating other cultures according to the customs and standards of your own culture, leading to a bias whereby you view your culture as superior
• Reductionism


  The view that behaviour is better explained by breaking it down into simpler constituent parts
• Holism


  • Able to explain certain aspects of social behaviour which reductionism could not. Examples are 'conformity to social roles' in the Stanford Prison Study. Looking at the situation as a whole by watching the interactions between the prisoners and guards was important to understand behaviours such as deindividuation that took place. Holism is the approach taken to understand behaviours of more wider social contexts.
• Socially sensitive research with ethical implications

  • Goddard (1917) did research which found IQ to be fully genetic. This led to eugenic procedures in the 1920s whereby the feeble minded (people with a low IQ) were sterilised.
• Idiographic approach


  Focused on the subjective experiences of one's 'self' and each person's individual ability to strive to achieve self-actualisation. Psychodynamic approach uses case studies to emphasize the importance of individual experience.
• Nomothetic approach


  Involves many lab experiments and brainscan evidence on many people whereby generalisation of human functioning have been made. Behaviourist approach does many experiments on animals to develop generalisable laws of learning.
• Cultural relativism


  The idea that norms, values and behaviours and culturally specific and may not be universal. The aforementioned should be evaluated in the context of the culture in which they occur.
• Etic approach


  When a researcher does an investigation in one culture but then tries to apply it to another, which is known as imposing etic.
• Emic approach


  When the researcher conducts the study in the same culture which they are studying.
• Universality


  Refers to when conclusions can be applied to everyone regardless of which place, culture or time a person is in.
• Determinism


  Belief that behaviour is determined by external or internal forces acting upon an individual that is out of their control.
• Hard determinism


  States that we have completely no control over what directs our lives.
• Soft determinism


  States that our behaviour is determined by external or internal forces but at the same time we do have some control.
• Types of determinism


  • Biological - all behaviour is innate and determined by genes
  • Environmental - all behaviour is determined by factors outside the individual, e.g. parental influence, the media, or previous experiences
  • Psychic - behaviour is the result of childhood experiences and innate drives (id, ego and superego), as in Freud's model of psychological development
• Free will


  The ability to act at one's own discretion, to choose to behave without being influenced by external forces.
• Approaches that take the side of nurture in the nature-nurture debate

  • Behaviourist
  • Humanistic
  • Social Learning Theory
  • Psychodynamic (stance is a compromise between nature and nurture)
• Nativists


  Believe that all human characteristics are a result of heredity (the genetic transmission of characteristics)
• Empiricists


  Believe that all human characteristics are a result of the environment and experience
• Beta bias


  • Differences between the genders are minimised. This can lead to researchers forming invalid theories. For example with the fight or flight theory, research was done on males and it was assumed that it also applies to females but actually Taylor et al (2000) found that women have more of a tend and befriend response.
• Androcentrism


  When behaviour is judged to be normal when compared to a male standard. This leads to female behaviour being judges as either 'deficient' or 'abnormal'.
• Gender bias in psychological research can impact on females' lives. Research where gender bias is involved can easily present scientific justification for denying women opportunities in the workplace and in society.