Issues and debates

AO1: What is universality?

Any undermining characteristics of human beings that is capable of being applied to all, despite differences in experience and upbringing

AO1: What two forms does gender bias come in?

Alpha and beta bias

AO1: What is androcentrism?

May result in either alpha or beta bias psychology which has been very male dominated

• Only 6 women on a list of 100 most influential psychologist → traditionally has been produced by males, for males and about males.

AO1: What is alpha bias?

The exaggerated difference between men and women, these differences are presented as fixed or inevitable.

AO1: What experiments from Y12 link to alpha bias?

Freud: Theory of psychosexual development, during the phallic stage both boys and girls develop a desire for their opposite-gender parent.

• The boy has a strong castration anxiety (fear his father will cut off his penis). The anixety is resolved when the boy identifies with his father but the girl's eventual identification with her same-gender parent is weaker - superego is weaker

Therefore women/girls are deemed morally inferior to boys/men.

AO1: What is beta bias?

When the differences between men and women are ignored or underestimated. This happens when we assume that research findings apply equally to both men and women even when women have been excluded from the research process.

AO1: What experiments from Y12 link to beta bias?

Asche: Different length line experiments (social influence)
Zimbardo: Stanford prison (social influence)
Milgram: Shock experiment (social influence)

• They all did experiments with only male participants

• They then expected the results to generalise to women

AO1: What is gynocentrism and what is a Y12 link?

Gynocentrism is female focused research

Y12: Moscovici - Only used femalre participants, which meant it suffered from gynocentric beta bias

AO3: Biological vs. social explanations (Gender bias)

Limitation: Gender differences are often presented as fixed and enduring when they are not - suggesting that differences are 'hardwired' before birth

- Maccoby & Jacklin (1979): presented the findings of gender studies which concluded that girls have superior verbal ability whereas boys have better spatial awareness.

- Daphne Joel et al. (2015): used brain scanning and found no such gender differences in brain structure or processing -> potentially that research done by Maccoby and Jacklin was popularised because it fit already made stereotypes about boys and girls.

AO3: Sexism in research (Gender bias)

Limitation: Gender bias promoted sexism in the research process. Women still remain underrepresented in University departments, particularly in science. Although the psychology undergraduates intake is mostly women → lecturers tend to be men (Murphy et al.)

• May disadvantage participants who are women

• May produce gender biased research

AO3: Gender-biased research (Gender bias)

Limitation: Works that challenge gender bias may not be published

• Magdalena Formanowicz et al (2018) analysed more than 1000 articles relating to gender bias which had been published over 8 years.

• They found that research on gender bias is funded less often and is published in less prestigious journals

Consequences: fewer scholars become aware of it or apply within their own work - may not be taken as seriously as other forms of bias.

AO1: What is ethnocentrism?

Ethnocentrism refers to a particular form of cultural bias and is the belief in the superiority of one's own cultural group.

AO1: What experiments from Y12 link to culture bias?

"Mary Ainsworth and Silvia Bell's (1970): The Strange Situation is an example of culture bias, critisised for reflecting only the norms and values of what may be called 'Western' culture
They conducted research on attatchment type and suggesting that the 'ideal' attatchment was characterised by the babies showing distress when left alone by their mother-figure (secure attatchment) 

• Led to a misrepresentation of child-rearing practices in other countries which deviated from American 'norms' 
• Japanese infants were much more likely to be classed as insecurely attatched, they showed considerable distress when seperated (Takahashi 1986)

"

AO1: What is cultural relativism? (Explain the link between this and Ainsworth)

John Berry (1969): He drew a distinction between etic and emic approaches in the study of human behaviour.

• An etic approach looks at behaviour from the outside of a given culture and attempts to describe those behaviours as universal. 

• An emic approach functions from the inside of a culture and identifies behaviours that are sepcific to that culture

Ainsworth and Bell's research is an example of imposed etic because they studied behaviour inside one culture (America) and then assumed their ideal attatchment type could be applied universally.

AO3: Classic studies (Culture bias)

Limitation: Many of the most influential studies in psychology are culturally-biased.
Cultural bias is a feature of many classic studies of social influence. Seen in both Asch's and Milgram's original studies, they were both conducted exclusively with US participants (who were mostly white, middle-class students). Therefore, any replications of the studies in different countries will produce different results.

AO3: Cultural psychology (Culture bias)

Strength: Cultural psychology was, according to Dov Cohen (2017), the study of how people shape and are shaped by their cultural experience. 
Cultural psychologists strive to avoid ethnocentric assumptions by taking an emic approach and conducting research from inside a culture.

This suggests that modern psychologists are mindful of the dangers of cultural bias and are taking steps to avoid it.

AO3: Ethnic stereotyping (Culture bias)

Limitation: It has led to prejudice against groups of people.
Stephen Jay Gould (1981): explained how the first intelligence tests led to eugenic social policies in the US. Psychologists used the opportunity of WW1 to pilot their first IQ tests on 1.75 million army recruits.

Many items on the test were ethnocentric - assumptions that everyone would know the names of US presidents and because recruits from south-eastern and African-American groups recieved the lowest scores it incentivised racist discourse about their inferiority 

• They were described as 'feeble-minded' or 'mentally unfit' - therefore denied educational and professional opportunities as a result.

AO1: What is free will?

The suggestion that human beings are essentially self-determining and free to choose their own thoughts and actions.

It does not deny biological and environmental influences but implies that we are able to reject therse forces if we wish because we control our thoughts and behaviour

AO1: What is determinism?

Determinism proposes that free will has no place in explaining behaviour, though there are hard and soft versions:

Hard determinism: Sometimes referred to as fatalism, it suggests that all human behaviour has a cause and we should be able to identify it. This position always assumes that everyting we think and do is dictated by internal or external forces that we cannot control - may be too extreme a position.

Soft determinism: William James (1890) - The first to put forward the idea of soft determinism, this position later became an important feature in the cognitive approach. He said that while it may be the job of scientists to explain what determines our behaviour, this does not detract from the freedom we have to make rational conscious choices in everyday situations.

AO1: Name and explain the different types of determinism:

Biological determinism: Emphasises the role of biological determinism in behaviour, influences of the automatic nervous system on the stress response or the influence of genes on mental health. Modern biological psychologists would recognise the mediating influence of the envirnonment on our biological structures.

Environmental determinism: B.F. Skinner described free will as an 'illusion' and argued that all behaviour is the result of conditioning. Although we may think we act independently, our experiences of choice are merely the sum total of reinforcement contingencies that have acted upon us through life.

Psychic determinism: Sigmund Freud also believed that free will is an 'illusion' but he emphasised the influence of biological drives and instincts. He saw human behaviour as determined by unconscious conflicts, repressed in childhood. "

AO3: Practical value (Free will vs. determinism)

Strength: The common sense view is that we exercise free choice in our everyday lives on a daily basis. However even if that not the case thinking we do exercise free choice can improve our mental health.
Rebecca Roberts et al. (2000): Looked at adolescents who had a strong belief in fatalism. The study found that these adolescents were at significantly greater risk of developing depression. 
 → People who exhibit an external, rather than internal, locus of control are less likely to be optimistic.
Therefore, even if we do not have free will, believing we do may have a positive impact on our mind/behaviours.

AO3: Research evidence (Free will vs. determinism)

Limitation: Brain scan evidence does not support it but does support determinism.

Benjamin Libet et al. (1983): Instructed participants to choose a random moment to flick their wrists while he measured activity from their brain ('readiness potential')

Participants had to say when they felt the conscious will to move.

Findings: Libet found that the unconscious brain activity leading up to the conscious decision to move came around half a second before the participant consciously felt they had to move.

Therefore, can be interpreted as evem our most basic experiences of free will are actually determined by our brain before we are aware of them.

AO3: The Law (Free will vs. determinism)

Limitation: the position of the legal system on responsibility.

A hard determinist stance is that individual choice is not the cause of behaviour. Ths is not in line with the way in which the legal system operates. The court of law deems that offenders are held responsible for their actions.

The main principle in our legal system is that the defendant exercised their free will in committing the crime.

Therefore, in the real world, determinist arguments do not work.

AO1: What is the interactionist approach?

The idea that nature and nurture interact. The nature-nurture debate seeks to answer whether our behaviour is more influenced by nature or nurture, so it's not really a debate as any behaviour/characteristic is a combination of both.

John Bowlby (1958) claimed that a baby's attatchment type is determined by the warmth and continuity of parental love (environmental) while Jermone Kagan (1984) proposed that a baby's innate personality (temperment) also affects the attatchment relationship. Therefore nature (child temperment) creates nurture (parental response), so environment and hereditary interact.

AO1: What is the diathesis-stress model?

The diathesis-stress model suggests behaviour is caused by a biological or environmental 'trigger' (stressor).

Eg. Y12 Biological explainations for OCD: A person who inherits a genetic vulnerability to OCD may not develop the disorder but if combined with a psychological trigger (traumatic experience) this may result in the disorder appearing.

AO1: What is epigenetics

It refers to the change in our genetic activity without changing the genes themselves. A process that happens through life and is caused by interaction with the environment. Aspects of our lifestyle or events we encounter (from smoking and diet to trauma and war) leave 'marks' on our DNA, which switches genes on or off.

These epigenetic changes may go on and influence the genetic codes of our children, as well as their children. This therefore introduces a third element into the debate - the life experience of previous generations.

AO1: What are the key concepts of the nature-nurture debate?

Nature refers to inherited influences, or hereditary. People like Rene Descartes (1596-1650) argued that all human characteristics (even some of knowledge) are innate. Psychological characteristics like intelligence or personality are determined by biological factors (genes), just as physical characteristics like eye colour or height are.

Nurture refers to the influence of experience and the environment. Empiricists including the philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) argued that the mind is a blank slate at birth (Tabula rasa) which is then shaped by the environment - later became important to the behaviourist approach

AO3: Adoption studies (Nature vs. nurture)

Strength: Adoption studies are useful because they seperate the competing influences of nature and nurture. If adopted children are found to be more similar to their adoptive parents, this suggests the environment is the bigger influence.

Whereas, if adopted children are more similar to the biological parents (no influence on their environment) then genetic factors are presumed to be more dominate. 
Meta-analysis by Soo Rhee and Irwin Waldman (2002): found that genetic influences accounted for 41% of the variance in aggression.

AO3: Epigentics (Nature vs. nurture)

Strength: An example of how environmental effects can span generations presumably through epigenetic effects come from events of WW2. In 1944, the Nazis blocked the distribution of food to the Dutch people and 22,000 died of starvation (became known as the Dutch Hunger Winter).
Ezra Susser and Shang Lin (1992) report that women who became pregnant during the famine went on to have low weight babies.

Whilst this is unsurprising, the interesting part is that these babies were twice as likely to develop schizophrenia when they grow up compared to more typical population rates.
Therefore, supports the view that life experiences of previous generations can leave epigenetic 'markers' that influecnce the health of their offspring.

AO3: Real-world application (Nature vs. nurture)

Strength: Research suggests that OCD is a highly heritable mental disorder
Gerald Nestadt et al. (2010): puts the heritability rate at .76. Such understanding can inform genetic counselling because it is important to understand that high heritability does not mean it is inevitable that the individual will go on to develop the disorder.

This means that people who have high genetic risk of OCD because of family background can recieve advice about the likelihood of developing the disorder and how they might prevent this.

AO1: What is holism?

The approach looks at a system as a whole and sees any attempt to subdivide behaviour or experience into smaller units as inappropriate. 

This was the view of Gestalt psychologists who argued that the whole is greater than that sum of its parts. They state that knowing about the parts does not help us understand the essence of that person.

AO1: What is reductionism?

Reductionism seeks to analyse behaviour by breaking it down into its constituent parts. Based on the scientific principle of parsimony - all phenomena should be explained using the simplest principles.

AO1: What are the levels of explaination in psychology?

• Socio-cultural level
• Psychological level
• Physical level
• Environmental/behavioural level
• Physiological level
• Neurochemical level 

Each level is more reductionist that the one before

AO1: What is biological reductionism?

Includes both the neurochemical and physiological levels and also evolutionary and genetic influences. Based on the premise we are biological organisms and thus on some level all behaviour is at some level biological.

Biologically reductionist arguments often work backwards.

AO1: Environmental (stimulus-response) reductionism

The behaviourist approach is built on environmental reductionism, it proposes that all behaviour is learned an acquired through interactions with the environment, they explain behaviour in terms of conditioning which is focused on simple stimulus-response links reducing behaviour to basic elements.

Y12 link: Learning theory of attatchment

AO3: Practical value (Holism and reductionism)

Limitation: Holistic accounts of human behaviour tend to become hard to use as they become more complex. This can present researchers with a practical dilemma. If we accept, from a humanistic perspective, that there are many different factors that contribute to depression then it becomes difficult to know which is the most influential. Difficult to know which to prioritise as the basis of therapy.

Therefore, holistic accounts may lack practical value.

AO3: Scientific approach (Holism and reductionism)

Strength: In order to conduct well-controlled research we need to operationalise the variables to be studied - break target behaviours down into constituent parts. This makes it possible to conduct experiments or record observations (behavioural categories) in a way that is objective and reliable.

Y12 link: research done on attatchment (the Strange Situation) operationalised component behaviours such as seperation anxiety.

AO3: Higher level (Holism and reductionism)

Limitation of reductionism: Often there are aspects of social behaviour that only emerge within a group context and cannot be understood in terms of individual group members.

Y12 link: For instance, the effects of conformity to social roles in the prisoners and guards in the Stanford prison study could not be understood by observing the participants as indiviudals. The important part was the interaction between people and the behaviour of the group.
There is no conformity 'gene' so social processes like conformity can only be explained at a high level at which they occur. Therefore, for some behaviours, higher level explainations provide a more valid account.

AO1: What is the idiographic-nomothetic debate?

Centered around 2 opposing approaches
The idiographic approach suggests that psychology should be the study of individuals because by obtaining lots of detailed information about the individual (or group), we can understand human behaviour better.

The nomothetic approach suggests that psychology should be the study of large and varied groups to make generalisations about what is typical in different aspects of human behaviour.

AO1: What type of research does the idiograohic approach use? Give a Y12 example.

Qualitative research, with the particular use on case studies and unstructureed interviews
Eg. Carl Rogers sought to explain the process of self development including the role of unconditional positive regard. This derived from in-depth conversations with clients during therapy.

Sigmund Freud's careful observations of individuals were the basis of his explainations of human nature, for example Little Hans was used to explain how a phobia might develop.

AO1: What type of research does the nomothetic approach use? Give a Y12 example.

Quantitative research, hypotheses are formulated, samples of people (or animals in some cases) are assessed in some way. With the use of structured questionaires or psychological tests. 
Eg. The behaviourist and biological approaches are nomothetic. B.F. Skinner studied animals to develop the general laws of learning. His researched looks at one aspect of behaviour in a few animals but the main aim was to establish general laws.

Biological psychology may use a small sample, Robert Sperry's split brain research involved repeated testing and was for the basis for understanding hemispheric lateralisation.

AO3: Complete account (Idiograpahic vs. nomothetic)

Strength: The idiographic approach contributes to the nomothetic approach. The approach uses qualitative methods of investigation and this provides a global description of one individual. This may complement the nomothetic approach by shedding further light on general laws or indeed by challenging such laws. 
Eg. A single case may generate hypotheses for further study. Cases like HM may reveal important insights about normal functioning which may contribute to our overall understanding. 
Therefore, this suggests that even though the focus is on fewer individuals, the idiographic approach may still help form 'scientific' laws of behaviour.

AO3: Scientific credibility (Idiographic vs. nomothetic)

Strength: Both approaches fit with the aims of science. The processes involved in nomothetic research are similar to those used in the natural sciences.

Eg. establishing objectivity through standardisation, control and statistical testing. However, researchers using the idiographic approach also seek to objectify their methods. Triangulation is used whereby findings from a range of studies using different qualitative methods are compared as a way of increasing validity.

Therefore, suggests both approaches rasie psychology's status as a science.

AO3: Losing the person (Idiographic vs nomothetic)

Limitation of the nomothetic approach: Loss of understanding of the indiviudal. The approach is preoccupied with the general laws, predicition and control mean it has been accused of 'losing the whole person' within psychology.

Eg. Knowing that there is a 1% lifetime risk of developing schizophrenia tells us about what life is like for someone who has been diagnosed with the disorder. Understandng the subjective experience of schizophrenia might prove useful when it comes to devising appropriate treatment options

Therefore, the nomothetic approach may sometimes fail to relate to 'experience'.