Issues and Debates AQA A2

Pregunta	Respuesta
Free will and determinism	Revolves around whether or not people are free to choose how to think and behave or if behaviour is determined
Hard determinism	Implies that it should be possible to identify all causes of behaviour
Soft Determinism	Allows for both human behaviour to be determined and for people to exercise their free will
Biological determinism	Different parts of the brain, instinctive needs, hormonal system, evolutionary forces, genes
Environmental determinism	Good for prediction and control. Behaviour is under the control of reinforcement and punishment
Psychic determinism	Freud saw all thoughts and behaviour come from the unconscious mind and that nothing is an accident
Determinism and the scientific method	Determinism is compatible with the scientific method and helps raise the profile of psychology as a science as it obeys general laws
Humanistic psychologists	Subscribe to a free will point of view. But- consider mental illness... is it by free will?
Descartes	Subscribed to a view called nativism which argues that certain human characteristics are innate
The Empiricist viewpoint	John Locke, David Hume and John Stewart Mill argued that all knowledge is derived from human experience
Heritability coefficient	Provides a numerical figure from 0 to 1 representing the extent to which a characteristic is genetic in its origin with 1 being purely genetic
Plomin et al	Found personality characteristics had a heritability coefficient of between 0.15 and 0.5
Nature and nurture	To study the relative contribution of nature and nurture, twin studies and adoption studies are used to compare the environment to genetics
Social sensitivity	Refers to any psychological research that has wider ethical implications that impact outside of the research context that may affect groups of people in society
Universality	When applied to gender, means that all research is assumed to apply equally to both genders
Androcentrism	Refers to the fact that psychology has been male dominated and the theories tend to represent all male view which could result in alpha or beta bias
Alpha bias (gender)	An attempt to exaggerate the differences between genders
Beta bias (gender)	An attempt to downplay the differences between genders
Western bias	Most psychologists have been trained in the West
Cultural Bias	Concerned with the distorted view that psychologists have because of their own cultural affiliations and how this bias affects theories and studies
Alpha bias (cultural)	Refers to the theories that assume there are real differences between individualistic and collectivist cultures in conformity that turned out to be false
Beta bias (cultural)	Ignores or minimalises cultural differences, stating that all people are the same so should be investigated with the same methods such as IQ tests (Chilting test)
Ethnocentrism	Refers to the use of our own ethnic or cultural group as a basis for judgement about other groups (Batista family)
Cultural relativism	The idea that there is no right or wrong and it is important to consider the behaviour of an individual within their culture
Etic constant	The idea that an idea can be applied to all cultural groups.
Emic constant	Idea that only applies to one cultural group
Imposed etic	A culture specific idea is wrongly imposed on another culture
Idiographic approach	Focused on the differences between people and recognises the uniqueness of the person. This approach employs methods like an unstructured interview. It tends to adopt a holistic perspective but may seem unscientific
Nomothetic approach	Focusses on the similarities between people and attempts to establish general laws. It is aligned with the scientific approach and adopts a reductionist viewpoint
Reciprocal determinism	Human behaviour is affected by and affects the environment. A person's consciousness and awareness affected the behaviour and environment
Holism	The whole is greater than the sum of the parts
Reductionism	To understand human beings, the whole must be reduced to the simplest component parts
Levels of explanation	Highest- cultural and social Middle- psychological Lower- biological
Biological reductionism	Attempts to explain all behaviour in terms of neuropsychology, genes and biochemistry
Behaviourists	Reduce behaviour to stimulus response associations in the environment
Gestalt psychologists	Reject the reductionism approach
Kohler	Gestalt psychologist that showed problem solving in animals could not be reduced as problems are solved via insight learning which he linked back to creativity in humans

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	Creado por Ewa Klonowicz hace más de 7 años