AQA Psychology A-level Topic 8: Issues and Debates - Key Vocabulary

Flashcards covering key vocabulary from AQA Psychology A-level Topic 8: Issues and Debates.

Gender Bias

The differential treatment or representation of men and women based on stereotypes rather than real difference.

Alpha Bias

A tendency to exaggerate differences between men and women, suggesting that there are real and enduring differences between the two sexes.

Androcentrism

The consequence of beta bias and occurs when all behaviour is compared according to a ‘male’ standard, often to the neglect or exclusion of women.

Beta Bias

A tendency to ignore or minimize differences between men and women.

Universality

The aim to develop theories that apply to all people, which may include real differences. It describes any underlying characteristic of human behaviour which can be applied to all individuals, regardless of their differences.

Cultural Bias

The tendency to judge all cultures and individuals in terms of your own cultural assumptions. This distorts or biases your judgements.

Cultural Relativism

The view that behaviour, morals, standards and values cannot be judged properly unless they are viewed in the context of the culture in which they originate.

Ethnocentrism

Seeing things from the point of view of ourselves and our social group. Evaluating other groups of people using the standards and customs of one’s own culture.

Indigenous psychologies

A method of countering ethnocentrism, the development of different groups of theories in different countries.

Determinism

The belief that behaviour is controlled by external or internal factors acting upon the individual and beyond their control.

Biological determinism

The view that behaviour is always caused by internal biological forces beyond our control, such as the influence of genes.

Environmental determinism

The belief that behaviour is caused by previous experience through classical and operant conditioning.

Psychic determination

Freud’s theory of personality suggests that adult behaviour is determined by a mix of innate drives and early experience. These result in unconscious conflicts over which we have no control.

Free will

Each individual has the power to make choices about their behaviour, without being determined by internal or external forces beyond their control. A common feature of the humanistic approach.

Hard determinism

The view that all behaviour can be predicted, according to the action of internal and external forces beyond our control, and so there can be no free will.

Soft determinism

A version of determinism that allows for some element of free will and suggests that all events, including human behaviour, has a cause.

Environment

Everything that is outside our body, including people, events and the physical world. Any influence on behaviour which is non-genetic.

Nature

Any influence on behavior which is genetic e.g. the action of genes, neurochemistry, neurotransmitters and neurological structures.

Heredity

The process by which traits are passed from parents to their offspring, usually referring to genetic inheritance.

Interactionist approach

With reference to the nature-nurture debate, this is the view that the processes of nature and nurture work together rather than in opposition.

Holism

With respect to a behaviour such as memory or mental disorder, perceiving the whole experience rather than the individual feature and or the relations between them.

Reductionism

An approach that breaks complex phenomena into more simple components and implies that this is desirable because complex phenomena are best understood in terms of a simpler level of explanation.

Levels of explanation

These are different ways of viewing the same phenomena in Psychology e.g. socio-cultural, psychological, physical, physiological and neurochemical.

Biological reductionism

Reducing behaviour to biology as it is based on the premise than we are biological organisms.

Environmental reductionism

Behaviourist explanations suggest that all behaviour can be explained in terms of simple stimulus response links.

Idiographic approach

A method of investigating behaviour which focuses on individuals and emphasises their uniqueness.

Nomothetic approach

Seeks to formulate general laws of behaviour based on the study of groups and the use of statistical, quantitive techniques.

Socially-sensitive research

Any research that might have direct social consequences for the participants in the research or the group that they represent.