Reductionism / Holism

• Reductionism is the belief that human behaviour can be explained by breaking it down into smaller component parts.
• Levels of explanations:

  There are 3 different levels of explanation within reductionism.

  • higher levels: take into account social and cultural factors
  • middle levels: reduce behaviour to more simple psychological explanations (cognitive, behavioural, environmental)
  • lower levels: reduce behaviour to individual, biological factors (eg: neurochemistry, genes, brain structures)
• Biological reductionism:

  Biopsychologists try to reduce behaviour to a physical level and explain it in terms of individual, biological factors (eg: neurochemistry, genes, brain structures)
• Environmental reductionism:

  Behaviourists assume that all behaviour can be reduced down to simple stimulus-response associations - and that complex behaviours are a series of S-R chains.
• A03 - leads to errors:

  One critique of biological reductionism is that it can lead to errors in understanding as it ignores the complexity of human behaviours.
• A03 - leads to errors (E)

  Eg: to treat conditions like ADHD with drugs in the belief that the condition consists of nothing more than neurochemical imbalances, is to mistake the symptoms of the phenomenon for its true cause.
• A03 - leads to errors (E)

  While drugs like Ritalin may reduce these symptoms, the conditions that give rise to ADHD aren’t addressed.
• A03 - leads to errors (L)

  Furthermore, since success rates of drug therapies are so highly variable, the purely biological understanding seems inadequate.
• A03 - substantive (P)

  The critique of environmental reductionism is that it is as much methodological as it is substantive.
• A03 - substantive (E)

  Much of the relevant research in the Behaviourist tradition has involved using non-human animals as subjects - for example, the classic Pavlovian experiments.

  The Behaviourists believe that the basic processes that govern learning are the same in all species, so animals can replace humans as experimental subjects.
• A03 - substantive (E)

  But is human behaviour simply a scaled up version of that dogs and rats? Critics point to the social context in which humans are embedded from the earliest moments of life, and factors like cognition, emotions, and intentionality which are hard to measure.
• Brofenbrenner’s ecological systems theory views child development as a complex system of relationships affected by multiple levels of the surrounding environment - from immediate family and school settings, to broad cultural values, laws, and customs.
• Brofenbrenner holds the view that to study a child’s development, we must looks at the child and their immediate environment, and the interaction of a larger environment.

  This is the approach taken by humanists - who looks at the whole integrated and subjective experience of an individual.
• A03 - unscientific (P)

  The holistic explanation attempts to blend different levels of explanation.
• A03 - unscientific (E)

  Holistic theories and approaches attempt to provide a complete and realistic understanding of human behaviour.
• A03 - unscientific (E)

  However, holistic explanations don’t establish causation because they don’t examine behaviour in terms of operationalised, isolated variables which can be measured and manipulated.
• A03 - unscientific (L)

  This means that holistic explanations are viewed as unscientific.
• Experimental reductionism:

  Where complex behaviour is reduced to a single, isolated, operationalised variable for the purpose of testing.