humansitics:

• AO3:

  STRENGTH:

  • rejects attempts to break up behaviour into smaller components
  • behaviours explain human behaviour in terms of simple stimulus-response units. Cognitive psychologists see humans as little more than informational processing 'machines'
  • In contract, human psychologists advocate holism, the idea that subjective experience can only be understood by considering the person as a whole.
  • This approach may have more validity than its alternatives by considering meaningful human behaviour within its real-world context
• AO3:

  LIMITATION:

  • However, having said that reductionist approaches may be more scientific.
  • This is because the idea of science is the experiment and experiment reduces behaviour into independent variables and dependent variables.
  • One issue with the humanistic approach is that, unlike behaviourism, there are relatively smaller concepts that can be broken down to single variables and measured
  • This means that humanistic psychology in general is short on empirical evidence to support its claims
• AO3:

  STRENGTH:

  • Its optimistic
  • Humanistic psychologists have been praised for bringing the person back into psychology and promoting a positive image of the human condition
  • Freud saw human beings as prisoners of their past and claimed all of us existed somewhere between ' common unhappiness and absolute despair'
  • In contract human psychologists see all people as basically good, free to work towards the achievements of their potential and in control of their lives
  • Suggests that human psychologists offer a refreshing and optasmistic alternative to other approaches