AO1

• Holism is perceiving the whole experience rather than the individual features and/or the relation between them
• Reductionism — An approach that breaks complex phenomena into more simple components
• Holism

  Psychologists study the whole person to gain an understanding of all the factors that might influence behavior. Holism uses several levels of explanation including biological, environment and social factors.
• Reductionism suggests that lower-level explanations will eventually replace higher-level explanations, according to the reductionist hierarchy of science i.e. Sociology, Psychology, Biology, Chemistry and Physics (from top to bottom). Explanations begin at the highest level and progressively reduce down to the bottom of the hierarchy.
• Levels of explanation

  • Highest level — Cultural and social explanations of behaviour e.g. depression being explained by a withdrawal from social activities, low energy levels and insomnia, which is viewed as odd by society.
• Levels of explanation

  • Middle level — Psychological explanations of behaviour e.g. depression being explained by Beck’s Cognitive Theory
• Levels of explanation

  • Lower level — Biological explanations of behaviour e.g. depression being explained by the action of candidate genes
• Biological reductionism — Reducing behaviour to biology as it is based on the premise than we are biological organisms.
• Environmental reductionism — Behaviourist explanations suggest that all behaviour can be explained in terms of simple stimulus response links