Holism - Breaking up behaviour and experience is wrong and can only be understood by analysing the person or behaviour as a whole:
Shared with humanistic approach
Reductionism - Analyses behaviour by breaking it down into constituent parts
Levels of explanation in psychology:
E.g. OCD
Socio-cultural context - Repetitive hand washing
Psychological level - Having obsessive thoughts
Physical level - Movement of hands when washing them
Hierarchy can be placed
Biological reductionism - Made up of biological organisms - All behaviour is biological at some level and be explained through genetic influences e.t.c.
Environmental reductionism - Mind regarded as a black box
Evaluation for holism:
Aspects of social behaviour on a group context - Cannot be understood at the level of individual group members
Effects of conformity to social roles and de individuation in the Stanford prison experiment - Interaction between people and the behaviour of the group was important
Strength: Holistic explanations provide a more complete and global understanding of behaviour that reductionist approaches
Evaluation against holism:
Cannot be scientifically tested and become vague and speculative the more complex it is
Higher level explanations combine many different perspectives produce a practical dilemma - Hard to establish which aspect is most influential
Limitation: Finding solutions for realworld problems - Low level explanations may be more appropriate
Evaluation for reductionism:
Forms basis of scientific research
Create operationalised variables - Break target behaviours down into constituent parts - Conduct experiments and record observations and be more meaningful and reliable
Strength: Gives psychology greater credibility placing it on equal terms with natural sciences lower down in the reductionist hierarchy
Evaluation against reductionism:
Oversimplifying complex phenomena - Loss of validity
Explanations at the gene, neurotransmitter or neuron - Don't include an analysis of the social context within which behaviour occurs
Limitation: Reductionist explanations can only form part of an explanations