Hollism and reductionism:

• HOLLISM

  • looks at a system as a whole and sees any attempt to subdivide behaviour or experience into smaller units as inappropriate
  • View of Gestalt psychologists argued that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts
  • Therefore knowing about how the parts ie characteristics a person may have doesn't help us understand the essence of that person

  Humanistic focuses on the individual's experience which cannot be reduced to for example, biological units

  • use qualitative methods to investigate the self whereby themes are analysed rather than breaking the concept into component behaviours
• Reductionism

  • seeks to analyse behaviour by breaking it down into its constituent parts
  • It is based on the scientific principle of parsimony - that all phenomena should be explained using the simplest (lowest level) principles.
• REDUCTIONISM:

  different ways to explain behaviour - some more reductionist than others

  • Socio-cultural level, e.g. OCD interrupts social relationships.
  • Psychological level, e.g. the person's experience of anxiety.
  • Physical level - movements, e.g. washing one's hands.
  • Environmental/behavioural level - learning experiences.
  • Physiological level, e.g. abnormal functioning in the frontal lobes.
  • Neurochemical level, e.g. underproduction of serotonin
• Biological reductionism:

  Includes the neurochemical and physiological levels and also evolutionary and genetic influences

  • Based on the premise that we are biological organisms. Thus all behaviour is at some level biological
  • Biologically reductionist arguments often work backwards. For example, drugs that increase serotonin have been found to be effective in treating OCD. Therefore, working backwards, low serotonin may be a cause of OCD.
  • We have reduced OCD to the level of neurotransmitter activity.
• Environmental (stimulus-response) reductionism

  The behaviourist approach is built on environmental reductionism proposing that all behaviour is learned and acquired through interactions with the environment.

  • Explain behaviour in terms of conditioning which is focused on simple stimulus-response links reducing behaviour to these basic elements

  For example, the learning theory of attachment reduces the idea of love (between baby and person who does the feeding) to a learned association between the person doing the feeding and food resulting in pleasure.