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Issues & Debates (Idiographic vs. Nomothetic (Both approaches…

- - - - Humanistic Approach key points:
        1.It investigates all aspects of an individual.
        2.Any attempt to analyse personality in terms of simple response to stimulus is futile.
        3.It believes that a person can only be understood as a whole (body and mind) and cannot be reduced laws of conditioning or to biochemical processes in the brain.
        4.The drive for self-actualisation gives purpose and unity to the whole of the person.
        5.Following, in Roger's Person-Centered Therapy, the individuals encouraged to develop a sense of the whole person.
    - - Insight learning is a cognitive view of learning which is opposed to the reductionist stimulus-response (S-R) approach. It says that a new behaviour is acquired simply through the process of insight rather than by trial and error.
      - Evaluation of Gestalt Psychology:
        Strength - Much of the research of Gestalt psychologists focused on perception, which was often studied using visual illusions. These support a holistic approach as they show that people perceive more than the sum of sensations on the retina. (e.g the two lines of equal length depending on the shape of the fins at each end)
        Limitations - Such illusions illustrate some of the principles which might be operating in perception, but reducing the study of perception to simple two-dimensional stimuli does not explain how we normally go about making sense of the world (which is three-dimensional and much more complex)
    - - Evaluation of Holism and Interactionism:
        Strength - 1. Holistic and interactionist approaches provide a more complete picture of behaviour and experience than reductionist approaches. 2. Higher-level explanations do not ignore the complexity of behaviour and can therefore be more meaningful.
        Limitations - 1. There is difficulty in integrating and in investigating explanations from different levels. 2. Holistic explanations are more hypothetical than lower-level reductionist explanations and so lack the predictive power of a scientific explanation.
  - - - Evaluation of Biological Reductionism:
        Strength - it describes behaviour in a precise and
        concise terms, e.g. depression = low levels of serotonin.
        Limitation - Although there seems to be a biological basis to some disorders and behaviours, higher-level explanations are also necessary to give us a complete understanding of behaviour.
    - - Evaluation of Behaviourist Reductionism: Limitation - by dismissing levels of explanation other than the physical/muscular level, behaviourism fails to take into account that the context and ultimate goal of a behaviour (e.g. focusing on the movement of the arm when writing a cheque fails to explain why the cheque is being written).
        Strength - The emphasis on overt behaviour makes behaviorism highly objective and therefore scientific.