reductionism

• what is reductionism? (AO1 INTRO)

  • belief that human behaviour can be explained by breaking it down into smaller components to better understand it
• what do reductionists say? (AO1 INTRO)

  • the best way to understand behaviour is to look closely at the very simplest parts that make up our systems
  • then use the simplest explanations to understand how they work
• what is holism? (AO1 INTRO)

  • explanations should take a wider perspective
  • should consider the interactions between individuals, for example
• behaviourist approach - reductionist (AO1)

  • behaviour is a result of past learning, as behaviourists suggest
  • the relationship between stimuli and responses is the basis for how we behave
  • this is a reductionist view as complex behaviour is reduced to simple stimulus and response
• skinner - reductionist (AO3)

  • giving a child a reward will result in behaviour being repeated
  • giving a punishment will result in behaviour being stopped
  • skinner tested this by rewarding food pellets to the rat every time it pulled the lever (desired behaviour)
  • as a result, the rat’s behaviour was repeated
• skinner - reductionist - counter (AO3)

  • some behaviours may be too complex to understood by a purely reductionist approach
  • e.g. learning to speak may be influenced by reward and punishment, but it is also likely to be influenced by other factors (like upbringing, having siblings, etc)
• biological - reductionist (AO1)

  • psychological problems can be treated like a disease
  • they are often treatable with drugs
  • identifying the source of someone’s mental illness as an imbalance of chemicals in the brain, for example, is reductionist
• aggression / beeman - reductionist (AO1)

  • can be explained by hormones (i.e. testosterone), brain areas, and evolution
  • Beeman investigated aggression levels by castrating mice and found that it had reduced aggressive behaviour
  • by injecting them with testosterone later on, their aggression was reestablished
  • therefore the biological approach may be deemed as reductionist as behaviour is broken down to simple biological causes
• biological - reductionist - counter (AO3)

  • reductionist approach only tells us the biological cause of behaviour
  • it doesn’t tell us how it feels to have a mental disorder or why someone develops a phobia
  • e.g. just because a part of the brain associated with fear is active while listening to certain pieces of music, doesn’t mean you are scared of it
  • therefore the reductionist approach may not be entirely valid
• cognitive - holistic (AO1)

  • although it recognises underlying biological causes of behaviour, it is more concerned with developing workable models of behaviour that can be applied to the way information is processed
• WMM - holistic (AO3)

  • memory models have become more holistic over time
  • WMM was built on the foundations of the MSM and it explains memory as a complex system
  • it involves combining previously stored knowledge with new incoming information in the forms of visual/spatial/auditory/etc
  • memory would not be explained fully by a reductionist model which simply looks for brain structures where different types of memory is stored
• WMM - holistic - counter (AO3)

  • can still be reductionist
  • humans are reduced to processors of information
  • machine reductionism - the belief that humans functions are the result of ‘units’ of activity in processing systems (e.g. memory stores)
• incomplete

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