Issue and debates evaluation

Question 1

Gender bias

Answer 1

feminist psychology

• one way to counter androcentrism is to take a feminist persepctive, argues that difference arises from biological explanations of behaviour,
• alternative social constructionist approach aims to understand behaviour in terms of social processes and find a way to greater equality
• feminist psychology agrees that there are real biologically based sex differences but soically determined sterotypes make a far greater contribution to perceived differences
• feminist aim to redress the imbalance and research in psychology
• one way to do this is to use evidence to prove that women may be inferior to provide women with greater support, for example women may be less effective then men at being leaders but this leads to develop suitable training programmes and create a future with more women as leaders

bias in research methods

• if psychological theories and studies are gender biased, one consequence is that research may find differences betwene genders, it may not be the genders that different but the methods to test them are bias so that male and females appear to be different
• Rosenthal found that male experimenters are more pleasant to female participant than to male participants therefore males appeared to perform less well on tests that there were assigned
• feminist argue that lab experiments disadvatnage women because findings created in the controlled world of the lab tells us very little difference about the experiences of women outside the of these settings, noted that studies found women and men were judged as more similar in styles of leadership than in lab settings

reverse alpha bias

• another approach is to develop theories which show the differences between men and women but emphasise the value of women
• can be seen in feminist research were women are better for example women are better at learning because they are more attentive, flexible and organised - challenges the stereotype that in any gender difference the male position must be better

avoiding beta bias

• beta bias has consequences for women, but it also has positives for example equal treatment under the law allowed women greater access to education and occupational opportunities
• Hare Mustin and Marecek point out that arguing for equality between men and women draws attention away from womens special needs and from differences in power between men and women
• in a society where one group holds most of the power seemingly neutral actions end up benefiting the group with the power and ignores the biological demands of pregnancy and other issues

assumptions need to be examined

• examples of gender bias continue unchallenged in many theories for example Darwins theory of sexual selection portrays women as choosy and males as the one who compete to be chosen, plays in the reproductive success for females to be more selective because the costs to produce eggs are high - explains coyness as a mean of masking their interest in males when they are making choices
• view has been challenged as being rooted in Victorian idea that women are coy and men are aggressive
• women are equally competitive and aggressive when the needs arise for example DNA evidence supports the idea that it is a good adaptive strategy for females to mate with more than one man, this puts females in competition with other females

Question 2

cultural bias

Answer 2

indigenous psychologists

• one way to counter ethnocentrism in psychology is to encourage indigenous psychology this is the development of different groups of theories in different countries
• for example Afrocentrism is a movement that proposes that all black people have their roots in Africa and that psychological theories concerning such people must therefore be African-centred and must express African values
• this disputes the idea that European values are universally appropriate descriptions of human behaviour that apply equally to European and non-European alike and suggest that the values of Europeans devalue non-European people and therefore are irrelevant to the life and culture of people of African descent

the emic-etic distinction

• indigenous psychology is an emic approach which emphasises the uniqueness of every culture by focusing on culturally specific phenomena, problem with this is they they are significant only to the understanding of behaviour within that culture
• etic approach seeks universal of behaviour - for example to avoid cultural bias we use indigenous researchers in each cultural setting this is what David Buss and co-workers did in study of mate preferences, collected sample from people in 37 different cultures using three local researchers

bias in research methods

• cultural bias can be dealt with by using studies with samples from different cultural groups, not the situation at the end of the last century, for example Smith and Bond surveyed research in one European textbook on social psychology and found that 66% were American, 32% eurpoean and 2% from the rest of the world
• Sears reported that 82% of undergraduates as the participants in psychology studies and 51% were psychology students, more recent study found that 67% were American psychology students, suggests that a considerable amount of psychology is based on middle class, academic young adults who are incidentally often male therefore they are unrepresentative on a global and western scale

consequences of cultural bias

• US army IQ test, used before the first world war
• test showed that European immigrants fell slightly below white Americans in terms of IQ and afro-Americans were at the bottom of this scale with the lowest mental age
• had profound effect on the attitudes held by Americans towards certain groups of people and led to sterotypes

the worldwide psychology community

• researchers in psychology travel much more therefore they have an increased understanding of other cultures at a personal level and professional level
• academics hold international conferences where researchers from many different culutres regularly meet to discuss and exchange ideas therefore there is a much greater exchange of ideas which should reduce ethnocentrism and increase cultural relativism

Question 3

free will

Answer 3

The illusion of free will

• being able to decide different course of action is not free will but gives us the illusion that we have free will,
• BF skinner argues that we may choose to buy a film but these choices are determined by previous reinforcement experiences

culturally relative

• idea of self-determination may be a culturally relative concept which only applies to individualist societies
• collectivist cultures but more value on behaviour determined by group needs

research challenge to free will

• Benjamin Libet et al, recorded activity in motor areas of the brain before the person had conscious awareness of the decision to move their finder therefore the decision to move a finger was a pre-determined action, more research confirmed this
• other researchers reached a different conclusion for example Trevena and Miller showed that the brain activity was a simply readiness to act rather than an intention to move, therefore at the moment neuroscience still supports free will

Question 4

determinism

Answer 4

genetic determinism

• doubtfall that 100% genetic determination will ever be found for any behaviour
• for example studies that compare identical twins find about 80% similarity on intelligence or about 40% for depression therefore if one twin has a high IQ there is only about a 80% chance that the other twin will be the same so does not determine

environmental determinism
- concordance rates show that environment cannot be the sole determining factor in behaviour and there is at least some genetic input therefore environmental explanations cannot solely determine behaviour

scientific determinism

• Dennett argues that in the physical sciences it is now accepted that there is no such thing as total determinism
• chaos theory proposes that small changes in initial conditions can subsequently result in major changes this is sometimes called the butterfly effect therefore casual relationships are probabilistic rather than being the sole determinant
• determinist behaviour oversimplifies human behaviour and they may be appropriate for non-human animals but human behaviour is less rigid and influenced by many factors for example cognitive factors such as thinking about what you intend to do can override biological impulses therefore finding a simplest determinist formula is unrealistic

does it matter

• attempt in criminal law in the US for murderers to claim that their behaviour was determined by inherited aggressive tendencies and therefore should not be punished with the death penalty
• Stephen Mobley who killed a pizza shop manager claimed that this happened because he was born to kill due to a high level of violence in family history this argument was rejected and he was sentenced to death
• look at mental disroder and if we take the view that the persons mental disorder was determined by their biology then it follows the treatment that we should target their genes or neurotransmitters however such determinism treatment may then block other treatment such as CBT

Question 5

Nature and nurutre

Answer 5

nature and nurture cannot be separated

• they both contribute
• the disorder phenylketonuria which is an inherited disorder that prevents the amino acid phenylalanine being metabolised resulting in brain damage, however if the condition is detected at birth then the infant can be given a diet devoid of phenylalanine and thus brain damage is averted is this nature or nurture

diathesis stress

• a diathesis is a biological vulnerability such as being born with certain genes that predispose a person to developing a disorder, however research has shown that not everyone with those genes does develop the disorder
• research has shown that not everyone with those genes does develop the disorder, expression of the gene or genes depends on experience in form of a stressor which triggers the condition therefore a persons nature is only expressed under certain conditions of nurture

nature affects nurture

• Genes may exert an indirect effect in a number of ways,
• first genetic factors create an microenvironment for example a child who is genetically more aggressive may provoke an aggressive response in others, becomes part of childs environment and affects development
• reactive gene environment interaction because the childs reacting to genetically influenced behaviour
• Plomin et al identified a second kind of interaction, passive infleuence were paretns genes determine aspects of their behaviour for example a parent with a genetically determined mental illness creates a unsettled home environment and the childs mental disorder could be due to indirect passive effects
• third kind of interaction is active influence, this is as the child grows older they seek out experiences and environments that suit their genes, research has shown that the influence of genes increases and children get older

nurture affects nature

• Magurire et al - Taxi drivers showed that the region of their brains associated with spatial memory was bigger than in controls, this is because there hippocampi responded to increase use
• Blakemore and Coopers work with kittens shows how expereince affects innate systems - if they were given large collars from when they were born to restrict what they could see and they were raised in a cricular drum where they could only see vertical or horizontal stripes, when they were introduced to the real world they no longer had the ability to see lines of the opposite orientation and their visual systems had been altered through experience

epigenetics

• refers to the material in each cell of your body that acts like a set of switches and these are passed on to subsequent generations
• explains why cloning does not produce identical copies, cloning involves placing genetic material from one individuals egg into one that has no nucleus, egg should grown into a identical copy but that doesnt happened this is because the epigentic material in the donrs egg cell was produced by environemental effects in the donors lifetime

Question 6

Holism and reductionism

Answer 6

The danger of lower levels of explanation

• lower levels are part of any account of behaviour but offering different levels creates problems, first if lower levels are taken in isolation then the meaning of behaviour may be overlooked and this can lead to fundamental errors of understanding
• for example Wolpe who developed the therapy of systematic desensitisation treated one woman for a fear of insects, he found no improvement from this behavioural method of therapy, it turned out that her husband who she had not been getting along was given an insect name so her fear represented her martial problem not the result of her conditioning, therefore to focus on her behavioural level and ignore any meaning would be an error
• danger of lower levels of explanation is that they may distract us from a more appropriate level of explanation

biological reductionism

• development of drug therapies as a result, they have led to a reduction in institutionalisation since the 1950s and a more humane approach to the treatment of mental illness insofar as it does not blame the patient which leads to greater tolerance of the mentally ill
• on the other hand drug therpaies are fraught with difficulties and their success rates are variable and they treat the symptoms not the causes therefore they may not have lasting effects, reducing mental illness to the biological level ignores the context and function of such behaviour
• psychological explanations take more account of these and have produced many successful therapies

environmental reductionism

• behavioural approach was developed as a result of experiments with non-humans animals, such explanations are not appropriate for more complex human behaviour
• human behaviour is influenced by social context, intentions and so on
• even in non-human animals reductionist explanations ignore other possible influences such as cognitive or emotional factors

experimental reductionism

• reduces behaviour to a form that can be studies is productive, may be necessary part of understanding how things work
• experimental psychology has produced a huge array of findings about behaviour but they may not apply to everyday life
• for example research into eyewitness testimony, findings from laboratory experiments such as Loftus and Palmer have not always been confirmed by studies of real life eyewitnesses where memories have been found to be highly accurate
• the operationalisation of variables such as eyewitness memory may result in something that is measurable but bears no resemblance to the real thing, in real life there are also other factors that motivate performance which cannot be recreated in an experiment therefore findings often do not reflect the real world

the mind-body problem an interactionist approach

• one of the issues arising from a reductionist perspective is the mind-body problem, the problem of describing the relationship between the mind and body/brain
• one solution to this problem suggests that ultimately everything is reducible to the physical world
• the problem with this is it assumes that the physical basis of behaviour has a causal link to the higher levels where we can only observe that certain physical events are associated with mental events, for example certain electrical activity in the brain is associated with subjective reports of dreaming, psychologists often make the mistake of leaping to the assumption that one causes the other
• another way to deal with it is to look at how the different levels of explanation interact
• dualists believe there is a physical brain and a non-physical mind which interact with each other and research has shown that the mind can effect our biology,
• Martin et al found that depressed patients who received psychotherapy experienced the same changes in levels of serotonin and norepinephrine in the brain as those receiving the drug

Question 7

idiographic and nomothetic approaches to psychological investigation

Answer 7

Focus of the individual level

• humanisitc psychologists and qualitative psychologists in the latter half of the last century felt that there was too much emphasis on measurement and that psychologists had lost sight of what it is to be human,
• Allport was the first to use the terms idiographic and nomothetic, argued that it is only by knowing the person as a person we can predict what that person will do in any situation, therefore this is the great strength of the idiographic approach has been to focus psychology back on the more individual level

scientific basis

• a criticism that is made of the idiographic approach is that it is not scientific, this is one of the reasons for the recent growth in positive psychology whose view is that humanistic psychology was not sufficiently evidence based and thereofre any findings were meaningless
• positive approach tends to be more evidence based
• the same criticisms cant be made about other idiographic approaches which do use an evidence based approach and also seek to be objective
• for example qualitative apporaches use reflexivity to identify the influence of any biases, relfexibility refers to the process where the researcher reflects or thinks critcially during the research process about the factors that affect the behaviour of both researchers and participants

being able to make predictions

• idiiographic approach may be scientific but the inability to produce general predictions about behaviour is limiting, such general predictions can be useful for example in producing drugs to treat mental illness, for example it would be far to time consuming to produce personal therapies for unique individuals and therefore we need to make predictions about the most likely therapeutic solutions
• Allport argued that the idiogrphaic approach does enable predictions, once a researcher has built up observations of a few individuals this can be made to used generalisations and formulate theories
• Hall and Lindzey argue that this stance makes Allports approach basically nomothetic rather than idiogrpahic

time consuming

• idiographic approach is more time consuming
• both apporaches are based on large amounts of data but one is in terms of collecting large amounts of data bout one person and the other is in terms of the number of people
• collecting large amounts of data from a group of people takes time but is quicker because once you have devised a questionnaire or psychological test, data can be generated and processed quickly

combined methods
- Holt argued that the idiogrpahic/nomothetic distinction is a false separation becasue inevitably generalisations are made
- Holt claimed that there is no such thing as a unique individual and what idiographic approaches actually do is generate general principles, therefore the idiographic approach ends up being nomothetic
- Million and Davis suggested that research should start with the nomothetic approach and once laws have been produced they can then focus on more idiographic understanding
- a number of approaches combine the two approaches
Freud used idiographic methods to study people but also used those insights to produce general laws about human development in his theory of personality
- uniqueness can be produced using the nomothetic approach this depends how we define uniqueness, for Allport only individual traits capture a persons uniquness whereas Eyseneck each individual is unique as they have a unique combination of extraversion, introversion and neuroticism therefore uniqueness can be explained through nomothetic laws