Topic Summaries

Holism and reductionism

A-Level > Psychology > AQA > A-Level Psychology Topic Summaries > Issues and debates > Holism and reductionism
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Addiction

  • Holism: the idea that ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’ Any attempt to break up behaviour in psychology is inappropriate as they can only be understood by analysing the person as a whole.
  • Reductionism: attempts to break actions and thoughts down to its smallest parts and dissect it. This is usually viewed as a scientific approach as it agrees that everything should be explained using basic principles.
  • Types of reductionism:
    • Biological reductionism: based on the idea that we are biological organisms made up of structures.All behaviour is biological on some level.
    • Environmental reductionism: ignores any mental influences and focuses on how people are strictly influenced by environment.
  • Evaluation of holism and reductionism debates:
    • Holism captures the complexity of human experience but is often impractical for scientific testing since it can be too broad and vague to produce clear interventions that lead to practical applications.
    • Reductionism enables scientific analysis, experiments, and effective treatments (e.g. SSRIs for depression), but it can oversimplify individual experiences, ignore emergent research, and fail to account for under-researched concepts or under-represented cultural context (e.g. social/environmental influences).

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