Debates in Psychology

1. Debates in Psychology Reductionism Versus Holism Freewill Versus Determinism Adapted from www.completepsychology.co.uk

2. Topics to Consider • Reductionist and holistic levels of analysis • forms of reductionism • a hierarchy of explanation • Free will and determinism • either/or, or somewhere in-between?

3. Overview • Disagreement about a range of issues • Different positions lead to different approaches to psychology • Important to understand these issues to be able to evaluate theories in psychology

4. Debate 1 Reductionism versus Holism • Reductionism is the view that complex phenomena can be best understood by reducing them to separate simpler parts Descartes held that non-human animals could be reductively explained as automata — De homines 1622.

5. Reductionism • Reductionism is the view that complex phenomena can be best understood by reducing them to separate simpler parts

6. Types of Reductionism • physiological reductionism • biological reductionism

7. Physiological Reductionism • Psychological explanations are replaced by physiological explanations in terms of brain operation, genetics, or both • Provides simple explanations than can often be tested scientifically

8. Biological Reductionism • Explain human behaviour in terms of simpler animals • Assumes continuity of behavior between animals and humans

9. Reductionism & Levels of Explanation • Some argue that the “best science” focuses on the deepest levels • Watson: ‘There is only one science, physics: the rest is just social work.’

10. Evaluation • Advantages of reductionism: • Scientific, easily tested and concise explanations • successful interventions e.g. treatment of bipolar disorder

11. Evaluation • Disadvantages of reductionism: • may lose features of the phenomenon of interest (‘can’t see the wood for the trees’) • most behaviours - e.g., violence - have a social meaning that may not correspond to biological processes

12. Holism • Human behaviour is highly complex and higher levels of analysis give a more complete and realistic view of behaviour • “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”

13. Holism • Answering the question as to why we are aggressive has more practical value than understanding the physiological underpinning of the behaviour.

14. Evaluation • Adopting many levels of analysis a challenge • Danger that biological aspects of behaviour are neglected

15. Debate 2 Free Will and Determinism

16. Free Will and Determinism • Do we have free will, or is all our behaviour determined by identifiable causes? • Much of psychology assumes determinism, since to be scientific (finding cause and effect) means identifying determining causes • However, determinism conflicts with our subjective experience of choice

17. Definitions of Free Will • Choice: • people have free will if they have a genuine choice of behaviour • Assumes that influences on behaviour can be rejected at will

18. Defining Determinism • Comes in a range of forms, depending on what’s seen as determining behaviour • e.g. behaviourism, psychodynamics, evolutionary psychology • Determinism means all behaviour has theoretically identifiable causes and can be predicted

19. Soft Determinism • A compromise position first proposed by William James 1890 • Behaviour is seen as determined to an extent, but in the absence of compulsion, people have a degree of choice and freedom • The question then becomes ‘How much is determined?’

20. Evaluation • Belief in free will matches subjective experience and our sense of moral responsibility • However, difficult to find an scientific explanation of behaviour if we don’t accept determinism • Perhaps different phenomena differ in the extent to which they’re determined • e.g. language use vs. instinctive responses