Reductionism or holism

Question 1

Reductionism

Answer 1

The belief that behaviour can be broken down into its constituent parts and researchers can analyse the relative contribution each factor makes

Question 2

Strengths of reductionism

Answer 2

Research will be scientific: isolating all factors except THE factor to investigate cause and effect
Focuses research on a singular factor means easier to find empirical evidence for the effect of an independent variable

Question 3

Weaknesses of reductionism

Answer 3

Behaviour is too complex to be reduced to a single cause
Causes decoupling problem where irl causes of behaviour work in conjunction with each other, so controlling all except one factor won’t be accurate in its effect

Question 4

Holism

Answer 4

Belief that human behaviour is caused by multiple factors and their interactions with each other, so research is best when we consider how at each level every factor contributes to behaviour

Question 5

Strengths of holism

Answer 5

Lots of factors are considered so high face validity
Gives a complex picture of human experience

Question 6

Weaknesses of holism

Answer 6

Not scientific because they do not establish a cause and effect relationship between an isolated variable
Hard to make predictions on what behaviour will occur if multiple factors are considered at once
Hard to know what factor has the biggest impact

Question 7

Examples of studies that support holistic explanations

Answer 7

Piliavin - considered multiple factors such as the victim’s race, state they were in (ill or drunk) on the amount of help they receive when they fall over on the subway
Simon and Chabris - considered 4 factors on inattentional blindness when showing participants a video of basketball and how they interact (transparency, difficulty of task, team they were told to watch, type of unexpected event)

Question 8

Examples of studies that support reductionist debates?

Answer 8

Loftus and Palmer - argued the verb used in the critical question is the sole cause of participants saying they saw broken glass when there was none in the video they watched
Sperry - argued that the reason participants had separate consciousness that allowed one side to say they saw a key but draw an apple was due to the cutting of the corpus callosum in the brain