Evaluation

• Real-world application

  One strength of the biological approach is that it has real-world application:

  • The use of psychoactive drugs to treat serious mental disorders.
  • For example, using antidepressants to increase levels of serotonin to treat depression and OCD. This improves the life of those suffering from these conditions.
• Counterpoint to real-world application

  Although antidepressant drugs are successful for many patients, they do not work for everyone:

  • Andrea Cipirani et al. (2018) compared 21 antidepressant drugs and found wide variations in their effectiveness
  • Although most were more effective than placebos, the researchers concluded that the effects of the antidepressants were, in general, 'mainly modest'
  • This suggests that brain chemistry alone may not account for all cases of, for example, depression
• Scientific methods

  One strength of the biological approach is that it uses scientific methods of investigation:

  • The biological approach uses a range of precise and highly objective measures
  • These include scanning techniques such as fMRIs and EEGs
  • With advances in technology, it is possible to accurately measure psychological and neural processes in ways that are not open to bias
• Biological determinism

  One limitation of the biological approach is that it is determinist:

  • It sees human behaviour as governed by internal, genetic causes over which we have no control
  • Individuals' behaviour are heavily controlled by external factors such as the environment, which the biological approach fails to identify
  • A purely genetic argument becomes problematic when we consider things such as crime
  • This suggests that the biological view is often too simplistic and ignores the mediating effects of the environment