Assumptions of the Biological Approach: Biological Factors

So far in the approaches section, we’ve seen that experimental psychology all started with Wilhelm Wundt, and then progressed from…

Experimental psychology started with Wilhelm Wundt, and then progressed from the psychodynamic approach, to the behaviourist approach, and then to the cognitive approach.

But, all this time, other scientists had also been studying human behaviour.

For instance, biology is the scientific study of living things – including humans!

Biologists ask stuff like, how do bacteria move around? How do mushrooms grow? Why do moose have antlers?

They ask questions like, why do living things look and behavethe way they do?

And biologists look for biological factors – things inside the body – that can answer these questions.

Now, one thing that’s inside the body is…the brain!

And so some biologists study the brain, and how things that happen in the brain might influence our behaviour.

And, we call this the biological approach to psychology.

So, on our timeline, we can say that biologists have been studying behaviour in parallel with the psychologists that we’ve covered already. So we can add it in like this:

Now, the key assumption of the biological approach is that we can explain behaviour mainly in terms of biological factors [bring back whatever graphics used to introduce ‘biological factors’, earlier]  – and how these biological factors affect what’s going on in the brain.

Now, in this section, we’re going to look at just two of these factors: genetics and evolution.

But first, to sum up, the key assumption of the biological approach is…

The key assumption of the biological approach is that we can explain behaviour mainly in terms of biological factors.

And the biological study of the brain and behaviour…

The biological study of the brain and behaviour has been happening in parallel with the history of experimental psychology.