Issues and debates

Culture bias.

Free will VS determinism

Nature VS Nurture

Holism VS Reductionsims

Ethical implications

Idiographic VS Nomathetic

Gender Bias

Androcentrism- A study conducted on males but generalised to females

Alpha Bias- Where differences between men and women are exaggerated to devalue one gender in comparison to the other- E.G- Freud's theory- Femininity is failed masculinity

Beta Bias- Where differences between men and women are minimised- E.G- Kohlberg's theory of moral reasoning, he concluded that women are morally inferior due to them being stay at home wives.

Universality- Theories that are applied to all people

Evaluation Points

Feminist Psychology- A way to counteract androcentrism by using a social constructionist approach rather than a biological approach in order to find greater equality between men and women. View women as normal humans and not deficient men

Reverse alpha bias is a way of counteracting Gender bias. It develops theories that show differences between men and women but emphasise the value of women. Things such as learning environments, women tend to excel as they are more attentive than men.

Avoiding beta bias- Beta bias generally creates more disadvantages fro women. for example if beta bias was sued things such as breastfeeding and childbirth would be ignored which minimises women.

Contributing issue- Gender bias may not be because of gender differences- In experiments Male researchers may be more pleasant to female p's than Male p's which creates confounding variables.

Ideographic- focuses on individuals and emphasises uniqueness and commonly uses qualitative data. Doesn't try to develop general laws of behaviour for everybody

Nomothetic- Any approach that studies groups of people in order to make general predictions- E.G- Biological approach assumes that low serotonin levels equal depression. Generally uses quantitative data due to high data range.

Evaluation points

Ideograpgic positive- Data focuses on an individual so its often richer and more detailed

Ideographic negative- Research is done on the individual who has unique traits and therefore cannot be generalised to all

Nomothetic negative- reductionsit becasue it ignores individual differences

Nomothetic positive- Can generalise findings to the population

Holism- Any approach that says p's must be treated as a whole and not reducing or simplifying complex behaviours. An example of Holism is the Humanistic approach.

Gesalt psychology- Focused especially on perception, argued that explanations of what we see only make sense when we consider the whole rather than individual elements.

Humanistic psychology- person acts as a whole rather than a set of stimulus responses.

Cognitive psychology-

Reductionism- Any approach that believes behaviour needs to be broken down into its component parts to be understood and resolved as this is the only way to claim causality- uses scientific methods

Biological reductionism- Explains behaviour purely from a biological approach such as genetics or the structure of the brain

Environmental reductionism- Simplifies behaviour into a response to a stimulus. E.G- behaviour of a person with OCD is a response to behaviour modelled by their parent.