holism + reductionism

• levels of explanation: the reductionist approach in psychology suggests that explanations begin at the highest level and progressively look at component elements
• levels of explanation: highest level = cultural and social explanations of how our social groups affect our behaviour
• levels of explanation: middle level = psychological explanations of behaviours
• levels of explanation: lower level = biological explanations of how hormones and genes etc. affect our behaviour
• levels of explanation: we can consider any behaviour in terms of all 3 levels, e.g. memory can be explained at a social level in terms of how cultural expectations affect what we remember
• levels of explanation: 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 + temporal lobe) + 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 reductionism: biological psychologists reduce behaviour to the action of neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones etc. a popular way to explain mental illness is in terms of such units
• biological reductionism: e.g. 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 reductionism: behaviorist 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
• environmental reductionism: 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
• holism: this approach focuses on systems as a whole rather than on the constituent parts and suggests that we can't 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 1st part of the 20th century
• Gestalt psychology: they focused 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 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 make other units (other neurons)
• cognitive psychology: these links develop through experience and w/ each new experience the links are strengthened or weakened
• cognitive psychology: 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 equal the whole
• reductionism S: by breaking down a phenomenon to its constituent parts, it may be possible to understand the whole
• reductionism S: the focus on a single aspect has led to some great discoveries in psychology, e.g. the cause of schizophrenia has been linked to excessive dopamine activity which led to improved treatment
• reductionism S: this is consistent w/ a scientific approach in psychology
• reductionism L: this is too simplistic because it ignores the complexities of human behaviour and experience
• reductionism L: behaviour often has a number of different causes = reducing possible explanations to one level can only provide a limited understanding
• holism S: a holistic approach may be more appropriate for psychology as it is looking at human behaviour, which has lots of aspects such as conscious thoughts + the context within which behaviour occurs
• holism S: this approach looks at the person as a whole, which is important in therapeutic settings = Jahoda's (1958) criteria of ideal mental health take a holistic view of what people should possess to be mentally well
• holism L: not isolating individual factors may make it difficult to discover causes of certain conditions or illnesses
• holism L: it is more hypothetical and lacks the scientific rigour that other explanations of behaviour offer
• example of reductionism: depression, phobias + memory = refer to my folder for in depth about phobias
• examples of holism: humanistic psychology, Maslow's hierarchy of needs and Gestalt Psychology
• holism = humanistic psychology: argues that humans react to stimuli as an organised whole, rather than a set of stimulus-response links, as an approach it uses qualitative methods to investigate all aspects of the individual as well as the interactions between people
• holism = Gestalt Psychology: adopts a holistic approach to perception, when we perceive something in the real world we do so as a whole rather than as a collection of bits and pieces