Holism and reductionism

• 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 real world 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