Reductionist vs Holism debate links to core studies PDF

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Reductionist vs Holism debate links to core studies Milgram: Reductionist: Could be reductionist in the sense that obedience is only due to the force from the authority figure. Participants only obey because they are told to, and that there is a sheer strength within us to have obedient tendencies. Holistic: Some may argue there are many different factors from the situation that caused higher levels of obedience for example the fact that participants were being paid, they may have felt obliged to help scientific research, the fact that it was conducted in a university which may have provided authority, felt obligated due to their voluntary consent. Bocchiaro: Reductionist: Similarly, to Milgram some may argue that participants only obeyed because they were told to by an authority figure. Holistic: Many factors could have led the students to obey for example since they were left alone they may have asked other participants if they were going to obey and therefore followed everyone else, unfamiliar and extreme circumstances, feel obliged to help further scientific understanding, some lack courage to blow the whistle. Piliavin: Reductionist: The cost-reward matrix can be seen as a quite reductionist explanation for why participants helped/didn’t help as it suggests that helping/not helping is a result of trying to escape heightened feelings of arousal which are uncomfortable and in order to do that we either help or move away from the situation. The study doesn’t take into account factors such as altruism and genuine desire help. Holistic: However, the cost reward matrix can also take a holistic view as people consider a range of costs and rewards of helping/not helping which helps them to make a decision. Further holistic approaches such as the different cognitive and situational factors for example less people wanted to help the drunk person perhaps due to disgust rather than the ill person. Bandura: Reductionist: Can be argued that aggressive behaviour is as a result of imitating behaviour from a role model as demonstrated in the results, those with an aggressive model produced aggressive behaviour whereas those with a non-aggressive model didn’t. Bandura made sure to reduce extraneous variables by spreading out the children with pre-existing high levels of aggression. Holism: Though there is significant evidence to show that behaviour was imitated however the situational factors may have affected the children such as the laboratory conditions and the gender of the model also has an effect on aggression levels as children are less willing to imitate a female model.

Simons and Chabris: Holism: Many factors of the situation affected the inattentional blindness in participants such as the transparency and difficulty of the task. Sperry: Reductionist: Very reductionist study as Sperry found that those with a severed corpus callossum operated with two different hemispheres. From this he established that language production comes from the left hemisphere. Casey: Reductionist: Delay gratification is a result of different activations of the prefrontal cortex and the inferior frontal gyrus. He also found that those who were able to suppress impulses as a child had a greater ability as adults. Holism: A holistic approach can be taken as to how children are able to develop delay gratification and how it differs in children. What factors mean that children are better able to suppress impulses than others. This could be due to parenting or other factors in someone’s life as an adult such as the nature of their job. Blakemore and Cooper: Reductionist: Very reductionist approach as it shows that the visual cortex is manipulated by the environment that the kittens were brought up in. Maguire: Reductionist: The longer the taxi driver had been working for the larger the volume of matter in the posterior right hippocampus. Those who weren’t taxi drivers had larger volume of grey matter in the anterior hippocampus. This shows evidence that there is a relationship between navigational skills and the distribution of grey matter in the hippocampus. Freud: Holistic: In a way Freud’s explanation for Hans’s phobia is quite holistic. He puts this down to Hans’s navigation of the Oedipus complex but also in terms of his ego defences as he repressed his anxiety that he would be castrated. Also Hans goes through different psychosexual stages that contribute to him overcoming the Oedipus complex and curing his fears....