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Assess how far psychology could be considered a reductionist explanation…
Assess how far psychology could be considered a reductionist explanation of human behaviour (20)
What is Reductionism? Reductionism is a way of explaining complex phenomenon (e.g. society) in terms of small units which make it up. it means looking at the parts of something when studying it.
Reductionism is seen as more scientific and analytical than holism as it can be more easily tested and falsified so is a valuable approach to studying human behaviour.
What is Holism? The opposite of reductionism is holism. This is the view that the smaller units of a phenomenon (e.g. society) never add up to the whole due to the relationship between the units (as this is more than the smaller units alone).
An Interactionist approach can combine different levels of an explanation of human behaviour to give a more complete realistic understanding than either extreme reductionist or holistic explanations.
Social Psychology
Social Psychology considers how individuals, group, society and culture affect human behaviour.
Consideration of why humans obey through evolution and socialisation in agency theory is a more holistic approach to studying obedience.
Social Impact Theory attempts to reduce social influence to an equation which predicts when people are likely to obey so is more reductionist.
Cognitive Psychology
Baddeley (1966b) tested acoustic and semantic coding in the LTM by asking participants to remember the order of a list of words.
The use of laboratory experiments to isolate acoustic semantic coding by Baddeley (1966b) is a reductionist way to assess memory.
Simplifying memory to STM and LTM and concluding it is encoded differently is reductionist.
Bartlett's reconstructive memory assumes schemas are used to fill in the gaps in memory.
Bartlett's theory of memory could be considered more holistic as it involves real life experiences and the socialisation process in how schemas are formed.
The working memory model breaks memory down into components such as the visuo-spatial sketchpad and phonological loop.
A holistic explanation for mmemory may be more useful as it would take into account an individuals social world and their past and present experience and the relationship between all the units.
Biological Psychology
Biological Psychology attempts to reduce human behaviour such as aggression to a single gene or set of genes.
Whilst a single gene causing behaviour could be considered reductionist, epigenetics suggests that genes only predispose individuals and that social factors are needed too which is less reductionist.
Raine et al (1997) concludes that violent behaviour could not be caused by a single brain region and that multiple areas are involved and predispose the individual to violent behaviour when combined with other social, psychological and environmental factors, so could actually be considered fairly holistic.
Learning Theories
Watson & Rayner (1920) used a laboratory experiment to isolate the stimulus and response pairings.
The use of controlled, standardised setting to isolate the stimulus and response pairings by Watson & Rayner (1920) is a reductionist way assess learning.
Social Learning Theory assumes learning is due to observation and imitation of role models.
As Social Learning Theory considers cognitive and social aspects of learning it can be considered a more holistic explanation of the learning process.