holism and reduc

• The reductionist approach in psychology suggests that explanations begin at the highest level and progressively look at component elements:. Highest level: cultural and social explanations of how our social groups affect our behaviour.• Middle level: psychological explanations of behaviour.. Lower level: biological explanations of how hormones and genes, etc. affect our behaviour.
• We can consider any behaviour in terms of all three levels. For example, memory can be explained at a social level in terms how cultural expectations affect what we remember. It can be explained at a psychological level in terms of episodic memories (memories of events in a person's life). It can be explained at a biological level in terms of the areas of the brain where the memories are stored (hippocampus and temporal lobe) and the neurotransmitters involved in forming memories (e.g. acetylcholine).
• Biological reductionism. Since all animals are made up of atoms, then human behaviour must be explainable at this level, i.e. can be reduced to a physical level. Biological psychologists reduce behaviour to the action of neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones and so on. A popular way to explain mental illness is in terms of such units. For example, it has been suggested that schizophrenia is caused by excessive activity of the neurotransmitter dopamine because drugs that block this neurotransmitter reduce the symptoms of this disorder.
• Environmental (stimulus-response) reductionism. Behaviourist explanations suggest that all behaviour can be explained in terms of simple stimulus-response links, i.e. behaviour can be reduced to a simple relationship between behaviour and events in the environment. Examples of such explanations include the behaviourist explanation offered for attachment. The complex emotion of attachment is reduced to a set of probabilities: the mother is likely to provide food which is reinforcing (reduces discomfort). Hence, she is a rewarding individual and so becomes a 'loved one'.
• Experimental reductionism Reducing complex behaviours to isolated variables is a useful strategy for conducting research. It underlies the experimental approach where behaviours are reduced to operationalised variables that can be manipulated and measured to determine causal relationships. This approach focuses on systems as a whole rather than on the constituent parts, and suggests that we cannot predict how the whole system will behave just from a knowledge of the individual components. This means that reductionist explanations would only play a limited role in understanding behaviour.
• Gestalt psychology. The word 'Gestalten' means 'the whole' in German and was an approach favoured by a group of German psychologists in the first part of the twentieth century. They focused especially on perception, arguing that explanations for what we see only make sense through a consideration of the whole rather than the individual elements.
• Humanistic psychology. Humanistic psychologists believe that the individual reacts as an organised whole, rather than a set of stimulus-response (S-R) links. What matters most is a person's sense of a unified identity; and thus a lack of identity or a sense of wholeness' leads to mental disorder. Cognitive psychology. Memory is a complex system which in recent years has been understood in terms of connectionist networks. The idea of a network is that each unit (such as a neuron) is linked to many other units (other neurons).
• cognitive: These links develop through experience and, with each new experience, the links are strengthened or weakened. Connectionist networks are described as holist because the network as a whole behaves differently than the individual parts; linear models (where one item links only to the next in a sequence) assume that the sum of the parts equals the whole.
• A strength of biological explanations has been the development of drug therapies. Such treatments also are a more humane approach to the treatment of mental illness as they do not blame the patient, which may lead to greater tolerance of the mentally ill. On the other hand, drug therapies are not always successful and reducing mental illness to the biological level ignores the context and function of such behaviour.While drug therapies have a role to play in treating symptoms, psychological explanations take more account of causal factors and have produced many successful therapies.
• A limitation of the behavioural approach is that it was developed using non-human animals.While it may be appropriate to explain non-human animals behaviour in terms of simple components, such explanations may not be appropriate for more complex human behaviour.Humans are not scaled-up versions of other animals. Even in non-human animals, reductionist explanations ignore other possible influences such as cognitive and/or emotional factors.This means that environmental reductionism ignores other possible influences on human behaviour, such as social context, intentions and emotions.
• Reducing behaviour to a form that can be studied has been productive but may not tell us much about everyday life. Eg laboratory experiments investigating eyewitness testimony have not always been confirmed by studies of real-life eyewitnesses, where memories have been found to be highly accurate. The operationalisation of variables may result in something that is measurable but bears no resemblance to the real thing. Also in real life there are other factors that motivate performance. This suggests that experimental reductionism may have a negative effect on the relevance of research.
• One of the issues arising from a reductionist perspective is the problem of describing the relationship between the mind and body/brain. Everything is reducible to the physical world. The problem with this is that it assumes the physical basis of behaviour has a link to the higher levels, but we can only observe that certain events are associated with mental events. For example, certain electrical activity in brain is associated with reports of dreaming, but we can't conclude that one causes the other. An interactionist approach may be more appropriate than a reductionist one for explaining.